Since before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, he was rarely far from Volodymyr Zelensky’s side, whether welcoming foreign dignitaries to Kyiv, or accompanying the Ukrainian president abroad on crucial missions to secure military and diplomatic support.
Now, Andriy Yermak’s resignation could become Zelensky’s biggest political test since taking office six-and-a-half years ago. While the departure will likely play well at home, it casts uncertainty into the heart of the administration at a critical diplomatic moment.
Yermak, the former head of the president’s office, quit on Friday after anti-corruption officers raided his home – apparently the latest and highest-profile casualty of Ukraine’s spiraling scandal over alleged kickbacks in the energy sector.
The upset comes as Ukraine faces mounting US pressure to sign a peace agreement widely seen as favoring Russia. Just days earlier, Yermak had been in Geneva, leading Ukraine’s team as they met with a US delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the latest White House plan.
As he announced the dismissal, Zelensky said he was grateful to Yermak for “always representing Ukraine’s position in negotiations in exactly the right way.”
“It has always been a patriotic position,” he added.
Among Ukrainians, Yermak’s downfall will likely find considerable approval.
Yermak had become a deeply unpopular figure who “somehow aggregated all the dissatisfaction with what the president does wrong,” Nataliya Gumenyuk, a member of the board of independent news media organization Hromadske, told CNN.
A series of corruption scandals in recent years, a bust-up with his former, and highly popular, army chief, and the messy introduction of new mobilisation policies have all threatened to tarnish Zelensky’s image. But while his approval ratings are a way down from 2022 levels, they have held fairly steady over the last couple of years.
Another journalist, Olga Rudenko of the Kyiv Independent, said Yermak’s departure was proof of the strength of Ukrainian democracy.
“Think about it: A young democracy like Ukraine has independent institutions that are strong enough to investigate the most powerful man in the country – and to do so during the war,” she wrote on X.
A key question will be whether his departure increases the domestic pressure on Zelensky himself, or in fact turns the tide.
Gumenyuk said she believed Ukrainians would accept Zelensky’s framing of the loss of his right-hand man as a positive reset of his administration. And the president will have been heartened that MPs from his own party – some of whom had threatened to leave the party if Yermak remained in post – issued a statement praising him for putting the interests of the country first.
But a former government official told CNN the decision had come too late, arguing many Ukrainians would now be asking what Zelensky knew about Yermak’s actions.
“On the one side, you have his close ally, on the other side, you have his close friend, his former business partner,” the official said, referring to both Yermak and another man caught up in the latest scandal, Timur Mindich. “Do you really think the president wasn’t aware about this?”
Yermak’s widespread unpopularity was a function of his immense power as an electorally unaccountable head of the Presidential Office.
“He was a shadow prime minister,” Orysia Lutsevych of London-based think tank Chatham House said, describing a man who effectively chose who would serve in Zelensky’s government.
But Yermak was also fiercely loyal to his boss.
“There (was) a lot of co-dependency, they spent a lot of time together … Yermak positioned himself as a negotiator, as somebody who not only kind of runs the regular daily activities, but can solve problems,” Lutsevych said. “He’s a deal maker.”
Of his chief adviser, Zelensky himself said last year: “I respect him for his results. He does what I tell him.”
For sure, it seems hard to believe that Ukraine’s leader will easily find a replacement in whom he can place as much trust and responsibility.
And that’s before he weighs up the prosecution of the war and the international situation.
Yermak had been expected to go to the US this weekend to lead Ukraine’s delegation in another round of talks with the Trump administration.
It is unclear who will take his place as team leader, though Ukraine certainly has plenty of senior officials with experience of these highly difficult negotiations.
And even though he played such a prominent role in Zelensky’s diplomatic endeavors, Yermak’s reputation abroad was not what it once was. Becoming embroiled in a major corruption scandal only further weakened his standing, particularly in the United States, where even the whiff of misappropriated funds has always proved a major stumbling block for many of Ukraine’s supporters in Congress.
One European diplomat based in Kyiv told CNN that Zelensky “had little choice but to fire Yermak in view of the damaging headlines carried by global media.”
But it is perhaps the optics of chaos at the heart of power in Kyiv that will prove most damaging.
Russia, unsurprisingly, has seized on an opportunity to try to undermine Zelensky’s legitimacy.
“(The) political uncertainty that is caused by this scandal is growing and growing very fast, day by day. One can hardly now make a prognosis on what is going to happen next,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN’s Matthew Chance.
Pulling all the threads together, Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister and a key international ally of Ukraine, saw things bleakly.
He drew attention to the fact Yermak’s dismissal took place on the same day as a visit by Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban to Moscow, and in the midst of what he called the “chaos in negotiations” with the United States.
“A fatal combination,” he posted on X.
