Revolt of masses: whether Zelenskyy will dismiss Yermak before his birthday
The release of the Mindich tapes has triggered interesting developments in many areas, and they could genuinely have a positive impact on power balances if the situation is used properly. The question, however, is who intends to use this, for what, and how.
However, it seems that many are hoping the main blow will fall on the head of the President’s Office, Andriy Yermak.
Alibaba and Arahamiia’s ultimatum
Yermak is not mentioned anywhere on the released tapes. At the same time, on Monday, Holos MP Yaroslav Zhelezniak wrote on his Telegram channel that the head of the President’s Office is on the tapes and is coded there as "Alibaba".
By Tuesday evening, journalists had picked up a story that Davyd Arahamiia had allegedly said somewhere in parliament that either the president fires Yermak or there is no coalition in parliament.
It should be noted that relations between Yermak and Arahamiia have been strained for a long time, and since the head of the Servant of the People faction lost his prime minister, they have been downright bad. Recently, Bankova has been receiving ever more frequent signals about a "shortage" of votes.
When the author asked MPs to comment on these rumours, she heard two versions:
- "I haven’t spoken to him, but I’ve vaguely heard something along those lines."
- "That’s right, and he said this to the president."
"I also haven’t personally heard these words, but I do not rule out that this could have happened. Of course, Davyd did not issue any ultimatums to the president and phrased it very delicately, but something along these lines could have taken place. And this stems from the mood in parliament," a Servant of the People MP said.
According to members of the president’s faction, the Mindich tapes made a "revolutionary" impression on the president’s parliamentary faction.
"And now it is not only the opposition that is talking about restoring the Rada’s agency. Of course, nobody believes in a coalition government (what would that even look like – Tymoshenko as prime minister on even days and Petro on odd days? They would tear each other apart before they even formed a coalition), or in young technocrats. We’ve seen all that before. But we also perfectly understand where further rule in this manual-control mode will take the country," one interlocutor says.
"Right now, many people are seeking not so much agency as satisfaction. Some feel they were pressured, some that they were underestimated, some have genuinely had their eyes opened by what they heard and realised how he had been taken for a ride," another Servant of the People representative says.
"And this raises one question for MPs: who led us into these woods in the first place? Because if we go back to the events of July, we all understand that the initiative to attack NABU and SAPO was scripted far from parliament, you know where. But parliament took the flak for it, the president took the flak, and only one person came out looking squeaky clean. So now many are wondering: so you could just do that? So I did not hear Davyd say this verbatim, but that some people want to see him removed – that is true," another interlocutor tells the outlet.
Ultimately, this story materialised in the form of a statement made in the evening on Radio Liberty by Fedor Venislavskyi, a member of parliament and former presidential representative to the Verkhovna Rada and the Constitutional Court, who said that the head of the President’s Office, Andriy Yermak, has to step down.
"I did not demand that the president dismiss Andriy Yermak, but I believe that Mr Yermak’s resignation in this case would definitely have cooled down the stir around the government (this refers to the Verkhovna Rada’s vote on the dismissal of ministers – editor’s note), because it is no secret that the government was largely formed only after certain candidates had been approved in the President’s Office: whether it was the president personally or joint decision-making, I cannot say, because I do not have that information. And indeed, there was a lot of talk today among Servant of the People MPs that Mr Yermak should go, but the decision on who heads the President’s Office is the president’s decision. We will wait to see what decision he makes when he returns and announces it," Venislavskyi said.
A birthday present
Sources close to the President’s Office do not believe that the president will dismiss Yermak.
"Judging by the latest photos, including with Macron, it doesn’t look that way. And in general, I don’t believe this resignation is going to happen. In this context, it is possible only under two conditions: the NABU tapes would have to contain a direct conversation with Yermak about corruption, or show that he is getting a cut. In that case, the decision would be instantaneous. Or it would have to emerge that Yermak coordinated the crackdown on NABU and SAPO. And then the president would simply have no choice," the source said.
"I would sooner believe that on Thursday, NABU will give him a birthday present," he added.
For now, the main theory explaining NABU’s silence this week is that EU ambassadors have asked them not to "bring down the state".
The second version sits at the opposite end of the influence spectrum. On Bankova, as is well known, there are two paranoid theories about NABU’s actions. "The first is that this is all a hit ordered by Kolomoiskyi (and here I wouldn’t rule out that there is a strong note of Dnipro score-settling in this story). And the second is even simpler: that the United States is behind NABU’s actions and is using them to push President Zelenskyy towards talks with Russia," the interlocutor said.
One thing has to be acknowledged: one way or another, this story significantly weakens President Zelenskyy and makes him vulnerable to both external and internal attacks and blackmail. But in both cases, he has only his own entourage to ‘thank’.
"What choice the president will make, we’ll see on Thursday. Although we never received an official invitation to the meeting. We found out about it from Telegram. Thankfully, from the presidential channel rather than Zhelezniak’s," one MP quipped.
The broader irony is that just a couple of weeks ago, the Office assumed this parliament would somehow pass the budget and could then be forgotten about. Now it turns out that a second front may be opening here.
"They say there are serious arrears owed to rank-and-file MPs. And they already understand that they won’t be elected anywhere, so now they at least want to make some money. On top of that, Yermak’s conflicts with Arahamiia, Fedorov and others have escalated," says one opposition representative, who is now happily watching the "Titanic" go down from the back benches.
Personnel uncertainty
Despite a surge of almost revolutionary rumours, most MPs believe the end of the week in parliament will pass in a very predictable manner.
According to Servant of the People forecasts, on Wednesday, MPs will calmly dismiss Herman Halushchenko and Svitlana Hrynchuk from their positions as heads of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Energy and that will be it.
As an alternative scenario, the list of officials on their way out could be expanded by two more figures.
The list may also include Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba and head of the Financial Monitoring Service Filip Pronin.
Most Ukrainians first heard about Pronin due to the sanctions against Petro Poroshenko, and later through Yaroslav Zhelezniak’s investigation into the Poltava Regional State Administration previously headed by Pronin.
At yesterday’s meeting of the parliamentary commission on the Mindich tapes, NABU director Semen Kryvonos pointed to difficulties obtaining data from the financial monitoring service regarding the movement of funds linked to the companies involved in the case.
"We are already seeing certain issues in tracking funds related to defence procurement. These problems have existed for a long time, since February 2025, as soon as we began working actively in the defence sphere. We sent one request after another to the financial monitoring service seeking information on suspicious funds and transactions," Kryvonos said.
Thus, both Kuleba and Pronin could end up resigning, as both may appear on the tapes.
"Although in both cases the first move has to come from Syvyrydenko. Pronin is entirely within the Cabinet’s remit. And if Kuleba does go, his dismissal would happen only in about two weeks. That’s how it looks at the moment," the interlocutor told the outlet.
As for new appointments, there is complete calm on the rotation list. For the Ministry of Justice, only Iryna Mudra is being discussed for now, and for the Ministry of Energy — Naftogaz CEO Serhii Koretskyi, parliamentary committee head Andrii Herus, and his colleague Andrii Zhupanyn.
"But Koretskyi doesn’t want the job, Herus doesn’t want it, and Zhupanyn does, but he has a long list of issues," the interlocutor said. First, Zhupanyn pushed all of Halushchenko’s initiatives on buying Bulgarian reactors. Second, with two Google clicks, Zhupanyn will face problems because of his wife, who posted how they vacationed together during his work trip, flaunted expensive brands, and so on…
Among the personnel rumours, it is also worth mentioning that the President’s Office does not confirm reports that former Ukrainian ambassador to the US Oksana Markarova was being considered as a replacement for Yermak.
"Oksana was offered many positions upon her return, but she declined. She said she was tired of public service. To her credit, she has a very good sense of political timing," the source said.
But the key intrigue lies elsewhere.
In the government quarter, anxiety is growing over whether NSDC Secretary Rustem Umerov, who is definitely on the Mindich tapes, will return to Ukraine.
"If last Wednesday one could still believe his trip to Istanbul was a coincidence, once he extended his trip and ended up in the US, many began to doubt he would return," the source said. To make it back to the Supreme Commander-in-Chief's Headquarters on Thursday, Umerov has to fly out of the United States on Wednesday.
Fire point, Mindich and Umerov
Last week, Telegram channels leaked part of the suspicion served to Mindich, revealing that he pressured Rustem Umerov over a body armour contract connected to the company "Milicon".
And although the minister was quick to distance himself from Mindich and the contract, questions remain.
To enable two shell companies that are now clearly linked to Mindich to take part in the tender, the State Operator for Non-Lethal Acquisition (DOT) changed the qualification criteria for bidders, named the company Fortetsia Zakhystu the winner despite its lack of a sales licence, and when this came to light did not move on to the next bidder but cancelled the 1.6 billion hryvnia tender altogether. A month later, DOT held a new tender for a smaller amount – just 225 million – again with amended criteria, which Milicon went on to win. The company, bought just two days before the tender, did not even have its own body armour sample and submitted Fortetsia Zakhystu’s model instead, yet was still awarded the contract.
All these corruption risks had been identified as early as March by the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission and the Public Anti-Corruption Council. But DOT ignored both these findings and the compliance order from the State Audit Service, as well as the court ruling it lost over the tender results.
The contract was terminated under the new minister, Denys Shmyhal. The ministry also ordered a repeat ballistic examination, which confirmed that the body armour was of inadequate quality.
According to the author’s information, both Umerov and DOT head Arsen Zhumadilov appear on the recordings.
Umerov has reportedly been summoned for questioning at NABU several times over the body armour case, but has failed to appear.
A second problem for the minister may be the company Fire Point. Court hearings in the criminal case against Mindich’s organised group revealed that one employee of the cash-out money-laundering centre, Ihor Fursenko ("Roshyk"), had received a mobilisation exemption through this company.
And no one is going to believe that this mobilisation exemption was accidental.
However, proving the elements of a criminal offence in relation to UAVs and price inflation may turn out to be even more difficult than in the body armour case. UAVs are contracted by name and according to lists provided by the General Staff, which shifts responsibility away from the ministry and the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA). In the absence of a clear system for assessing the cost of components, it will be hard to establish overpricing. So here, explicit orders from the former defence minister may be the only decisive evidence.
Incidentally, around a month ago Fire Point representatives attended a meeting chaired by Denys Shmyhal. It was a meeting with banks, and participants were somewhat shocked by the company’s self-confidence and by the size of the loans it was demanding for itself.
"Bankers spent a long time explaining to them that no one would give such a loan to just one company. There are limits. Even Shmyhal and Havryliuk could not hold back and asked the company to be more modest, because they were asking for a budget comparable to that of an entire ministry. But the question remained of who had instilled this level of confidence in them," the interlocutor recounted.
Tetiana Nikolaienko, Censor.NET
