Zelenskyy exposed after top aide resigns amid US and Russia pressures

Andriy Yermak's departure, amid a spiraling corruption scandal, comes just as Donald Trump is pushing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia in order to end almost four years of fighting

By Aliaksandr Kudrytski, Volodymyr Verbianyi and Daryna Krasnolutska

 

The resignation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff leaves the Ukrainian president deprived of his most important adviser at a critical moment in the fight against the Russian invasion.  

Andriy Yermak has been Zelenskyy’s lead negotiator in talks with Ukraine’s allies and helped convince the US to leave out some unpalatable elements from a proposed peace plan last week. His departure, amid a spiraling corruption scandal, comes just as Donald Trump is pushing Ukraine to make concessions to Russia in order to end almost four years of fighting and Zelenskyy’s forces are facing shortages of weapons and funding.

 

 

Yermak’s decision followed a search of his apartment by anti-graft investigators early on Friday. While the authorities didn’t offer an explanation for the raid, they have been pursuing a widening probe that has drawn in several ministers and one of Zelenskyy’s former business partners. Yermak said he was cooperating fully with the investigation. He hasn’t been accused of involvement of any wrongdoing. 

 

“I am grateful to Andriy for always representing Ukraine’s position in the negotiation track exactly as it should be. It was always a patriotic position. But I want there to be no rumors or speculation,” Zelenskyy said in a video posted on Telegram. “There will be a reboot of the Office of the President of Ukraine.” 

 

Yermak has been a fixture at Zelenskyy’s side since the full-scale invasion began in 2022 and the Ukrainian leader has long sought to fend off criticism of his aide’s outsized influence. Zelenskyy said he’ll hold consultations on Saturday with potential candidates to take over the running of his office.

 

A Ukrainian delegation — including National Security and Defense Council Secretary Rustem Umerov and First Deputy Foreign Minister Sergiy Kyslytsya — is heading to the US for further talks, a person familiar with the matter said. They are expected to meet Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in Florida to discuss the peace plan, the person said requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

 

At talks in Geneva last weekend, Yermak had represented Ukraine and managed to persuade the US to redraft the terms of a deal that appeared to favor Russia and amounted to an ultimatum that Kyiv had to accept by Thanksgiving.

 

Trump-backed 28-point peace plan — drawn up between the US and Russia — would have seen Ukraine give up additional swathes of territory that Moscow has failed to capture and dramatically reduce the size of the Ukrainian military.

 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in a social media post on Friday that “the political crisis in Kyiv” is a “fatal combination,” coming at the time when Hungarian leader Viktor Orban is in Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin. 

 

Witkogff will be in Moscow next week as part of Trump’s efforts to broker a settlement. Questions have also been growing over Witkoff’s role in the negotiations since Bloomberg News published a transcript of a call last month in which he advised a senior Kremlin official on how Putin should appeal to Trump. 

 

Putin said on Thursday that he is willing to fight until Ukraine gives up the territories he seeks to control. The Russian president said Trump’s proposals for ending the war in Ukraine could be the basis for future agreements, but no final version exists yet. The US president said Tuesday there had been “tremendous progress” on his peace proposal over the past week.

 

Yermak’s resignation highlights the tensions between the president’s inner circle and the country’s anti-graft agencies, set up at the insistence of Kyiv’s western backers. 

 

Zelenskyy won power in 2019 with a promise to stamp out the corruption that’s plagued Ukraine for decades, but his domestic opponents and international allies have recently questioned how seriously he’s been pursuing that goal. 

 

In July, the president unsuccessfully sought to gain control over the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or NABU, and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, known as SAPO. The attempt drew widespread condemnation and triggered Ukraine’s largest street protests since the Russian invasion. 

 

The agencies responded with a probe targeting Zelenskyy’s allies. The findings of a 15-month investigation allegedly placed the president’s former business partner at the center of a large-scale scheme aimed at siphoning money from a state-run energy company. The funds were supposed to be used to protect energy infrastructure against Russian air strikes.

 

Timur Mindich, who helped run the TV production company that catapulted the Ukrainian leader to stardom as a comedian before his presidential bid, fled the country before an attempt to arrest him.

 

The drive to root out corruption has led to the dismissal of two ministers and implicated former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Chernyshov, who denies any wrongdoing. While Zelenskyy himself has faced a wave of public outrage — including from lawmakers in his ruling party — following the scandals.