Week without Yermak: Nature has cleaned up to 2019 levels but that’s not for sure
On Friday, it will be a week since the most significant resignation of this five-year term. After searches conducted by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) in the Mindich case, Andriy Yermak was finally dismissed by the president from the post of Head of the Office of the President.
The man about whom the president once said, "Yermak came with me and will leave with me", was ultimately traded for a higher interest – somewhere between the instinct of self-preservation and the preservation of the country.
And the most striking thing is that, although Yermak was regarded as almost the de facto head of state, not a single process in the country came to a halt after his dismissal.
"He was just a Count Cagliostro in power, who knew how to control access to the president’s ears," one of Censor.NET’s interlocutors said, commenting on the week without Yermak.
In 2020, when Yermak replaced Andriy Bohdan, many explained this change by saying that Yermak knew how to tell the president what he wanted to hear and did not come to him with problems, unlike Bohdan.
Thus, Yermak managed to push out not only Bohdan, the lawyer who was always a somewhat situational figure for Zelenskyy, but also the very close Borys Shefir (who, however, left Mindich to him as a legacy).
"If Bohdan was an apparatchik and ran the Office, Yermak tried to run the state. One day, he would summon diplomats, another day an entire ministry with all its deputies, then the security officials," a staff member of the outlet recalls.
"Some of them had to wait for these meetings for hours until he came down from the fourth floor, from the president," he adds.
Only three people had free access to the president bypassing Yermak: head of the Servant of the People faction Davyd Arakhamiia, Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, and the president’s communications adviser Dmytro Lytvyn.
It was thanks to this access that Fedorov was able, in the summer, to persuade the president that the rallies in support of NABU and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) were a genuine protest rather than political games by opponents.
For everyone else, there was a filter in the person of Andriy Borysovych.
His ambitions in steering the state progressed from orders to remove Andriy Koboliev and Volodymyr Kudrytskyi from their posts back in 2020 to an intention to dismiss the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) head Vasyl Maliuk in the autumn of 2025.
Yet despite all this, if you look around, it turns out that Yermak did not actually have that many people personally oriented towards him.
Who is the first person that comes to mind? Yuliia Svyrydenko? Many people link her promotion to the claim that it was the former head of the Office who pushed her for the prime minister’s position in order to replace Denys Shmyhal, who is closer to Arakhamiia’s wing.
However, Svyrydenko joined Zelenskyy’s team before Yermak strengthened his position, although she was transferred to the Office after he became its head.
However, as Servant of the People MPs say, her premiership is not Yermak’s achievement. "She is really a workhorse, she dreamed of this position and lives for her work. And as far as I know, when the president asked her about Yermak, she argued in favour of his dismissal," one source in the faction notes.
Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha is another example. It was Yermak who was said to have initiated the replacement of former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba with the current minister. However, according to the outlet’s sources, Sybiha dropped out of Yermak’s circle of trust when, in the spring, he brought back bad news from the United States that Yermak was not wanted there as a negotiator.
Yermak’s former university classmate Mykola Tochitskyi lost the post of culture minister back in the summer, and it is not clear at all why a career diplomat had to be put in that position in the first place.
Who else?
As it turns out, there are not that many such people.
There is the former Deputy Head of the Office of the President and current Minister for Communities and Territories Development Oleksii Kuleba. For three weeks now, rumours have been circulating in the government quarter that he will be dismissed, as he is allegedly also on the Mindich tapes.
Then there is former defence minister and current Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) Rustem Umerov, who became close to Yermak back when they tried to take control of part of the Voice faction’s votes. He remains one of the key actors in government and in talks with the United States, despite appearing on the Mindich tapes and, according to media reports, having agreed to very unfavourable terms for Ukraine in the peace plan.
National Bank governor Andrii Pyshnyi, who was even initially described as Yermak’s compadre – a claim the NBU chief has denied.
Then there is Centrenergo supervisory board chairman Andrii Hota, who moved to this position directly from the job of chief of staff to Yermak.
Mykhailo Pasichnyk, Yermak’s non-staff adviser in 2020–2023, became deputy director of the State Expert Centre of the Health Ministry in March 2025. As Bihus.info notes, this is the state institution through which all pharmaceutical drugs sold in the country pass. Pasichnyk twice (in 2002 and 2014) headed the State Medical Inspection. At that time, he was involved in scandals related to abuse of office and lobbying for his own pharmaceutical business.
The appointment of Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko in the summer was also linked specifically to Yermak’s patronage, despite the silent resistance of Oleh Tatarov.
But for some reason, this version has now been rolled back, and Kravchenko is no longer considered "Yermak’s man".
At the same time, a trail of loyalty to Yermak is still attributed to Security Service deputy head Oleksandr Poklad.
Yermak’s only undisputed appointee is his former business partner Roza Topanova, who sits on the supervisory boards of Ukrnafta and Oschadbank.
Vladyslav Vlasiuk is also very much Yermak’s man, overseeing sanctions policy in the President’s Office.
"He has planted quite a few of his people around. We will gradually clean them out," a parliamentary source tells Censor.NET.
For the MPs who failed to secure Yermak’s dismissal at a meeting with the president a week earlier, this was less a moment of truth than a moment of satisfaction.
Most of them regarded it as a deep injustice that in the story of the NABU law "both we and the president took the heat, and only Yermak somehow emerged unscathed."
So their comments are correspondingly sharp.
"What can I say? Nature is healing. You can think of it as us going back to 2019," says one Servant of the People MP.
"Well, now Davyd and Hetmantsev will be stuffing their people everywhere," his fellow faction member responds.
Those who have held a grudge against Yermak since the summer and regarded him as the main source of manual control over the state are so far very optimistic, particularly about the president’s idea of changing his approach to personnel policy. As is known, at the meeting with the president, MPs were told that, from now on, personnel decisions would be taken by "groups of three".
"These issues will be handled by the relevant parliamentary committees: the committee on energy issues will nominate candidates for the Energy Ministry, and the legal policy committee will do so for the Justice Ministry. These candidates must then be approved by the faction, of course, in communication and coordination with the prime minister and the president. Only then will the faction be able to officially vote for one candidate or another," MP Yevheniia Kravchuk said after the faction meeting.
However, no obvious successes are visible in this field yet. There are no candidates for energy minister after Serhii Koretskyi and Andrii Herus turned down the job. As for the justice minister, Denys Maslov is apparently still being considered.
"The fact that MPs were able to introduce their own proposals into the budget is also seen as an increase in our freedom," says one Servant of the People MP.
The president is expected to appoint the next head of the Office either on Thursday evening or on Friday. Various sources currently name Mykhailo Fedorov and Denys Shmyhal as the most likely candidates, which can hardly be called a good solution for the ministries they now lead.
"Shmyhal has only just prepared to implement his reform plan, which Yermak previously torpedoed for him. But it is clear that they will not take an outsider for this position; they need someone with personal loyalty," one source tells the outlet.
But for now, the only conclusion after this week is that the president has lost not only his habitual head of the Office, but also a very toxic lightning rod. It will now be much harder, if not impossible at all, to hide behind someone else.
So the only option left is to change the governance policies.
Tetiana Nikolaienko, Censor.NET
