On March 15, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy issued a decree establishing a new delegation for international peace negotiations to end the war with Russia. As expected, it included high-ranking officials such as foreign minister and defense minister. However, heading the delegation was Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who was also granted sweeping powers to hire and fire members of the delegation.
It was a striking departure from diplomatic convention: a chief of staff taking the lead in high-stakes public peace negotiations – a role usually reserved for a nation’s leader or top diplomat. What made it all the more remarkable was that across the negotiating table would be a Trump administration, an audience unlikely to welcome Yermak, given his role in the Hunter Biden affair that triggered Trump’s impeachment.
In 2019, it was Yermak whom the Trump team first approached to push for an investigation into Joe Biden’s son and his business dealings in Ukraine. Wary of entangling his country in the upcoming U.S. election, Yermak stalled for time. Within Trump’s camp, he — along with Zelensky — is seen as having played a pivotal role in the president’s downfall.
So Yermak’s appointment as delegation leader was an unusual choice. However, it underscored the outsized influence he wields in Ukraine, and his deep and long-running friendship with the president.
Rapid rise to power
The two men first met in 2011 when Yermak worked as a media copyright lawyer and Zelensky as a television actor and producer. When Zelenskyy ran for the presidency in 2019, Yermak worked for his election campaign team, bringing some of the political acumen he gained from eight years spent as an aide to Ukrainian lawmaker and Olympic wrestler Elbrus Tedeyev. Following Zelenskyy’s victory, Yermak was appointed as a presidential aide. Within just nine months, he had manoeuvred his way into the powerful role of chief of staff.
Today, Yermak is widely considered the second most powerful person in Ukraine
Inside the presidential office, Yermak was Zelenskyy’s point man for international relations and was heavily involved in privately negotiating prisoner exchanges with Russia. He also acted as Zelenskyy’s representative at international summits and, most recently (in his new and unexpected role) headed Ukraine’s peace delegation to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Today, Yermak is widely considered the second most powerful person in Ukraine, and Zelensky’s closest confidant. The two are known to dine together, lift weights together and even sleep in bedrooms on the same corridor in the network of bunkers under Kyiv that serves as the presidential administration. He is known to some as Zelensky’s “first apostle” — to others, Zelensky’s “Svengali”.
Indeed, domestic concerns have been mounting for years that he has consolidated too much power and politicised state institutions.
Critics argue that Yermak’s leadership recalls the era that gave rise to Ukraine’s pre-war oligarchs — figures who wielded an outsized influence on Ukraine’s economy and political landscape, often to the detriment of the nation’s democratic institutions.
Many Ukrainians are worried that their country is at risk of repeating the same mistakes. According to Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a local NGO, Yermak is building an entirely new oligarchy under the cover of martial law, and with cabinet ministers and his deputies at the office of the president at his beck and call. “He is damaging the war effort,” Kaleniuk says. Those concerns only deepen when corruption cases implicating Yermak himself are dropped without explanation, fueling suspicion that his influence extends over the anti-corruption bodies the public once hoped would deliver an era of accountability.
Hidden hands
It is true that corruption has long plagued Ukraine. It is also true that corruption has been a focus of Kremlin disinformation throughout the ongoing war.
Nevertheless, concerns over corruption in Ukraine have long been shared by its international partners, though rarely voiced in public. A confidential strategy document reveals that the Biden White House was deeply worried about it. However, the administration chose to stay quiet for fear of undermining confidence in the war-time government, and of providing grist to the mill for republicans critical of aid sent to Kyiv. Arguably, the silence backfired: the whiff of a cover-up helped turn Ukraine aid into a divisive issue in the U.S. election.
Since 2015, Ukraine has invested significant efforts into combatting corruption, particularly through the creation of institutions such as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine [NABU] and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office [SAPO]. These bodies were designed to stand apart from the rest of the corrupted judiciary, but they also served a broader purpose: their establishment was a prerequisite to securing critical financial and political support from Western allies following Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
And yet within Ukraine itself, despondency over corruption remains acute. A 2024 poll by Ukraine’s National Agency on Corruption Prevention [NACP] found that over 90 percent of Ukrainians believe corruption remains widespread; more than two-thirds say it is getting worse. And when asked who bears responsibility for the persistently high levels of corruption, a majority choose the anti-corruption agencies themselves.
Erosion of trust
While Ukraine’s new anti-corruption agencies began their life in good faith, a number of reports over the past five years indicate that Yermak has grown increasingly influential over them — with allies shielded from investigation and rivals targeted.
Within the President’s Office, oversight of these anti-corruption agencies fell to Yermak’s deputy, himself under investigation by them for bribery. In August 2020, President Zelensky appointed Oleh Tatarov — a key Yermak ally — as Deputy Head of his Office, a role that included responsibility for law enforcement and the justice system. Despite the glaring conflict of interest — and public petitions and protests calling for his dismissal over it — Tatarov stayed in the post. When the case against him was then dropped, concerns over conflicts ceased to be hypothetical for the public and began to erode trust in the state’s reform agenda.
In December 2020, the night before NABU and SAPO were to file charges against Tatarov, the prosecutor-general secretly replaced all the prosecutors overseeing the case — described by Transparency International as the first of several attempts to “sabotage” it. Soon after, the bribery investigation was transferred to Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the SBU, at the time, seen as more pliable to the whims of the president’s office and also under Tatarov’s remit. NABU issued a scathing response to this decision, calling it blatant political interference aimed at protecting Tatarov. According to the Kyiv Independent the SBU didn’t carry out the investigation. The case was then dismissed by prosecutors due to the expiration of the investigation period.
That Tatarov case demonstrates Yermak’s protective cloak. The inner circle is never touched, and the inner circle is now made up entirely of Yermak’s acolytes. When Zelensky first came to power, he appointed close friends he could trust, like Yermak, to senior roles. But many of those early confidants were pushed out through 2022 and 2023, in what many in Kyiv view as a Yermak-led purge of independent voices. Tellingly, several of those forced out have since become subjects of NABU investigations
With the reshuffling of personnel, concerns are mounting that Yermak has effectively monopolised the flow of information reaching the president. It also means that few now operate within the President’s Office without Yermak’s grace.
A political debt
Then in 2022, NABU’s competent director, Artem Sytnyk, a man known as the “Eliot Ness of Ukraine” for his willingness to go after criminals at the highest levels of government, was dismissed. Ruslan Habriyelyan — one of the detectives who had previously investigated Tatarov — was removed from the shortlist of candidates to replace him. He, along with several other experienced anti-corruption professionals, was passed over in favour of Semen Kryvonos, a bureaucrat with no experience of investigating corruption.
Kryvonos’ only qualification appeared to be his ties to Yermak, who in 2021 had been instrumental in securing Kryvonos a top job at a state regulator. The then-Governor of Odessa, under whom Kryvonos had served, publicly thanked Yermak on social media for backing Kryvonos and stopping “efforts to remove his candidacy.”
Like Tatarov, in a worryingly familiar pattern, Kryvonos has a history marred by allegations of bribery. When his selection was announced, a former NABU detective turned lawyer remarked: “Based on this information, there are great doubts about his integrity.” Integrity aside, it seemed Kryvonos now owed Yermak a political debt.
Back to the future
Under Kryvonos, dozens of experienced NABU staff were either resigning or being dismissed, ostensibly as part of a “staff optimisation” drive. But insiders and watchdogs say it was less about efficiency, and more about loyalty — a quiet purge aimed at replacing seasoned investigators with allies more aligned with the new director’s approach.
In 2024, it was publicly revealed that a NABU investigation implicating Yermak himself had been dropped years earlier. No explanation was given, despite seemingly damning evidence. The case dated to 2021. Just one month after Yermak’s appointment as Chief of Staff, his brother, Denys, was caught on video appearing to sell positions in the President’s Office. Neither brother disputed the authenticity of the footage, only claiming it had been taken out of context. “Yermakgate” caused protests and calls for the Chief of Staff’s dismissal.
Yermak dismissed the allegations as an “information operation” against his brother — the work of Russian agents. However, the quiet shelving of the NABU investigation without public disclosure raised suspicions in Ukraine in its own right.
A real problem is that Russia can — and has — exploited this. Disinformation is most effective when it feeds on credible concerns. No one sensible expected elections under martial law last year, when they would otherwise have taken place. But combined with growing perceptions of corruption and political purges without accountability, the Kremlin has weaponised that fact to push a narrative that Ukraine’s democracy is dying.
Ukraine is fighting two wars simultaneously: one against Russian aggression and another against internal corruption
More broadly, corruption must be addressed for a viable post-war Ukraine. At some point, the conflict will come to an end. The World Bank estimates that Ukraine will need half a trillion dollars for reconstruction. But without strong institutions, these massive contracts will invite vast corruption. Without active conflict nor public perceptions of war efforts to consider, Western allies will be less willing to part with their cash to fund them.
International business will be unlikely to step in to fill the void if corruption remains pervasive. Where private capital fears to tread, oligarchs find firmer ground to step up. And so, the cycle repeats — threatening to drag Ukraine’s war-battered population back into a past they hoped to leave behind.
Ukraine is fighting two wars simultaneously: one against Russian aggression and another against internal corruption. At the heart of both battles stands Andriy Yermak, a figure whose immense power has become both indispensable and controversial. His rapid ascent, marked by influence, intrigue, and unanswered allegations, embodies the dilemma facing Ukraine.
If unchecked, Yermak’s growing dominance risks mirroring the oligarchic power structures that Ukrainians once fought to dismantle. In the fragile moment after the war ends, Ukraine must choose carefully — between reform and relapse, accountability and oligarchy — because a nation rebuilt on compromised foundations risks repeating history rather than making it.
Maurizio Geri’s research has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101105349. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the EU or the Research Executive Agency. Neither the EU nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
