Is Yermak, Zelenskyy’s right-hand man, giving war-torn Ukraine to oligarchs? - Business Insider
The influential American publication Business Insider published an article by Pavlo Starobin about Andriy Yermak’s role in the political and economic life of Ukraine under this headline.
As Censor.NET informs, the article was published on Business Insider.
The article states: "In late September, Mike Pyle, President Joe Biden's top National Security Council official for international economic affairs, sent his counterparts in Ukraine a four-page 'working draft' he had written listing numerous reforms the White House expects Kyiv to implement in exchange for continued U.S. financial assistance. These included strengthening oversight of state-owned enterprises in the energy sector, as well as steps "to promote greater transparency and accountability in Ukraine's post-war reconstruction." In general, the goal was to curb state-sponsored corruption, which has long been a feature of Ukrainian governance.
Among the recipients of Pyle's letter was the Office of the President of Ukraine, a team of about five dozen insiders headed by Andriy Yermak, a longtime friend of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In Kyiv's political and business circles, Yermak, a former lawyer and film producer, is considered the second most powerful man in the country, a sort of Dick Cheney under George W. Bush. In fact, some consider Yermak more influential than the president, a former comedian who took office in 2019 without any prior government experience. As the two men stand next to each other in matching olive military uniforms, the bulky, over 6-foot tall Yermak towers over the wiry, 5-foot tall Zelenskiy. It often looks, Kyiv financier Andriy Sirko told me, as if Yermak is "babysitting Zelenskiy."
Then the author states: "I happened to be in Kyiv on the day Pyle's letter was sent, meeting with Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a human rights organization that receives funding from Washington and the European Union. Over the course of an hour, Kaleniuk painted me an unvarnished picture of Ukraine's political and economic power structure in the Zelenskyy-Yermak era. "The good story," she told me, is that Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has largely wiped out a generation of oligarchs who have had complete freedom to loot Ukraine's economy since the country's liberation from the Soviet Union in 1991. The old titans no longer have the power they once had over the parliament and the media, and many of their industrial assets lay beyond their reach in territory now occupied by the Russian army..
But the "bad story," Kaleniuk continued, is that Yermak-whom she called "drugged by power"-is creating a new system of oligarchy that he runs. According to her words, Yermak, through his deputies in the Presidential Office and Cabinet of Ministers, is maneuvering to establish control over a large part of Ukraine's economy, as well as its law enforcement and security apparatus. Through these machinations, she says, "well-connected people" in business are getting government contracts at inflated prices. "He is not building a strong Ukraine," Kaleniuk said. "He is harming the war effort." In fact, what she was describing is the formation of an accidental oligarchy under the cover of martial law, which Zelenskyy's government refers to.
According to Starobin, polls have shown that Ukrainians ranked corruption as the first obstacle to business development in the country, even ahead of the destruction caused by the war. However, the majority of Ukrainians surveyed said that military assistance to foreign partners would be "appropriate" to provide "only if corruption in Ukraine is effectively fought." In the latest Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by the supervisory organization Transparency International, Ukraine ranked 116th out of 180 countries, just ahead of Russia, which ranked 137th.
"The stakes are high. The Ukrainian soldier on the front lines is risking his life to regain control of his nation's government and economy from its most predatory players. This outcome, while a defeat for Russia, would mean a hollow victory for Ukraine and Washington. Meanwhile, the United States has already allocated about $67 billion to Ukraine's defense, and one estimate suggests that the cost of postwar reconstruction could exceed $1 trillion. What is in place to prevent the managers of the emerging oligarchy from siphoning off such transformative amounts of money-more than five times Ukraine's pre-war gross domestic product? "It's going to be a shark feeding," said Roland Spitz, a former investment banker in Kyiv. And the biggest sharks, he added, are "the people in power." "The new crowd," he continued, "is always the hungriest.
