Five politicians of 2025
Zelensky, Yermak, Myndich, Malyuk, Shabunin.
What’s the right format for a roundup of the year? Events? Far too many have transpired. Processes, reforms, intrigues? Too abstract, too complex.
So I’ve settled with a rather phallocentric list of individuals. Their affairs involve the great events of the year, the unfolding processes, the anti-climactic reforms. And all the links will take you to an article of mine on the topic. Today we’ll look at political heavyweights, and tomorrow, the leading lights of the army.
After all, it’s always easier to retell a film with reference to the characters, not the plot. And today’s cast contains plenty of show business veterans. There are few countries where the line between mass entertainment and elite politics is blurrier than Ukraine. And in the interests of made-for-TV digestibility, I’ll begin each character profile with a succinct summary.
Zelensky lives on
The president survived the year, but is more precarious than ever
The year began with an embattled Zelensky attempting to hold back the tide of public criticism amidst frontline defeats.
But the new man in the White House helped out Zelensky tremendously with his March attack on the Ukrainian president. The liberal press at home and abroad once again lionized Zelensky. Top Ukrainian politicians and analysts began tearfully predicting the assassination of the president.
The year ended in much the same way. Following the corruption scandal of November, his popularity (whatever that really means in a tremendously repressive wartime society) was lower than ever. There was also Zelensky’s July attempt to quash the independence of the anti-corruption organs created and beloved by the west.
But luckily, later in November, the nefarious Trump and his attempts to push Ukraine into accepting a peace deal once again came to the rescue. Media publications critical of Zelensky began saying that with his righthand-man Andriy Yermak removed on November 28, Zelensky has returned to the ‘energetic leadership’ he displayed in early 2022.
Liberal critics stopped attacking the president. Preventing the war from ending takes precedence.
There have been many predictions of Zelensky’s imminent end. People like pointing to hit-pieces against Zelensky in the western press as sign that his days are numbered. Seymour Hersh even wrote in July that Zelensky would soon be deposed by Washington in a 1963 Vietnam-style coup, an argument I critiqued in a popular article here. Not to place myself above such a venerable figure as Hersh, but it seems to me that with six months past, I wasn’t wrong to focus on Zelensky’s stability.
Anyway, this isn’t my first rodeo, so to speak. The western press has despised Zelensky as a crypto-Russian spy ever since his 2019 election. And yet, NATO still manages to manipulate him to get their way. It isn’t that hard to play a man as egotistic, embattled and superficial as Zelensky. An actor is always desperate for the audience to like him.
Will Zelensky survive 2026? On the one hand, it may be hard for him without the comforting presence of Yermak. And the fact that Zelensky backed down in late July when he attempted to liquidate the independence of the western-funded santi-corruption organs showed both his friends and enemies that there is no need to expect the president to have a backbone.
But on the other hand, the liberal nationalist media that critiqued him so harshly until a month ago is now saying that with Yermak gone, Zelensky has reverted to his supposed 2022 peak. They now praise him for consulting with a range of figures, instead of solely relying on Yermak. The struggle will likely re-emerge with greater ferocity if or when Trump backs off from pushing Zelensky to accept a peace deal.
All in all, Zelensky has proved his naysayers wrong enough times. I suspect he will continue clinging on to power. After all, there’s nothing more powerful than the TV. And there’s no greater television character than Zelensky.
Yermak abandoned?
The eminence grise was finally forced out, but remains in the shadows.
This wasn’t a good year for Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s presidential administration (the President’s Office/Bankova). On November 28, he was finally forced to resign, after five years as the most powerful man in the country after Zelensky.
Who is Yermak? This is still a question that’s hard to answer. He’d been hated for years by the western press and Ukrainian liberal nationalists, accused of being Russia’s main secret agent. This didn’t prevent him from enjoying a close relationship with Alexander Soros.
In fact, I’ve always been rather partial to the theory that Yermak is London’s main asset. He’s certainly always been very opposed to any peace deal. In fact, just a few days before his removal, he gave another grand statement to the British press railing against any peace in which Ukraine didn’t return to its 1991 borders. Was it Trump who got rid of Zelensky? Is Ukraine the arena for a shadow war between MI6 and the CIA?
To be fair, I’ve always felt that Yermak was removed more due to internal political squabbles than anything else. It was Yermak’s twin passion for micromanagement and pleasing Zelensky that led to the steady centralization of power from 2020 onwards. This earned him an endlessly expanding array of enemies. Many miss the profitable government sinecures they once had, snatched away by Yermak and given to one of his cronies.
Now that he’s gone, a much wider range of power players have access to Zelensky’s ear. There’s more space for everyone to scheme and profit. Everyone’s happy. Well, other than ordinary mortals.
And while Yermak may be gone from Bankova, he still apparently pays nightly visits to Zelensky’s personal residence.
Their relationship has always been deeply strange, it must be said. A few suggestive details from a famous Financial Times piece on Yermak from earlier in the year. Yermak is a lifelong bachelor. Besides law and show business, one of his main obsessions and business activities was jewelry. He is obsessed with looking good, and worked out daily with Zelensky in their bunker. They often slept side by side. He has a high pitched voice.
Asides from whatever conclusions you may wish to make based on that data, Ukrainian media has also been reporting that Yermak continues to enjoy good relations with a number of top figures in law enforcement and the state apparatus. Oleg Tatarov, often considered one of the key ‘Yermakites’ in power, remains the man in charge of controlling Ukraine’s law enforcement.
In short, Yermak is dead, long live Yermak. Whether he’s simply staying to curate his economic schemes or he has broader plans of a return to power has yet to be seen. The first is a given, the second is rather likely, though of doubtful wisdom.
The Myndich mystery
The secretive oligarch and Zelensky-insider fled to Israel, where he now happily plays the role of Ukraine’s greatest scapegoat
Timur Myndich is a man who had been friends with Yermak and Zelensky for a very long time. It was he who fatefully introduced Zelensky to oligarch Igor Kolomoisky back around 2008. This was very good for Zelensky’s show business career. By 2015, Kolomoisky’s television channel 1+1 aired Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ television show, where Zelensky played Vasyl Holoborodko, an honest schoolteacher who became president. And by 2019, fiction became real life. 73% of the country voted for Holoborodko as president.
Back in 2016, ‘the Servant of the People’ released a prophetic episode. It featured a scene in which a Jewish oligarch and his side-locked sidekicks stride towards a plane heading for Israel, escaping a corruption scandal in Ukraine. The leader whispers into the ear of an airport official: You probably know who I am. Timur Myndich. In November 2025, the episode once again became viral.
Little was known about the real Myndich until this year. In early November, the anti-corruption organs finally released tapes detailing corruption in Zelensky’s inner circle - the first public phase of the grandly-named ‘Operation Midas’. Myndich was Midas, with everything he touched turning into gold.
According to the anti-corruption community (called Sorosites by ill-meaning detractors), Myndich became omnipresent around 2023. With his former boss Kolomoisky imprisoned that year, Myndich took over his sprawling business empire. Over the course of 2025, particularly after Zelensky’s July attack on the anti-corruption organs, endless revelations about Myndich began pouring out from the liberal ‘Sorosite’ press.
There was Myndich’s diamond empire, which operated a Russian branch until 2024. There was Fire Point, the previously unknown arms company operated by lowly Myndich/Yermak associates, which gobbled up a third of the entire defense budget in 2024. There was Fire Point’s famous Flamingo missile, which many western-funded Ukrainian journalists and sundry militarists have claimed was a massive, inexistent fraud. Everywhere you looked, there was a bit of Myndich.
Operation Midas, at least in the tapes it published on November 10, focused on Myndich’s role in a scheme that embezzled $100 million USD from Ukraine’s nuclear power system in wartime. Naturally, Myndich escaped law enforcement and is once again comfortably in Israel, his main place of residence. As for the deeper geopolitical forces behind Operation Midas, I maintain my belief it was a European operation to push Zelensky against accepting a Trumpian ceasefire, not the opposite.
Myndich-gate ended up leading to the resignation of Yermak and a massive PR hit to Zelensky. But as soon as Trump, sensing Zelensky’s weakness, began pressuring Zelensky into accepting a peace agreement, the same liberal nationalist (‘Sorosite’) anti-corruption community that was screaming Myndich day and night suddenly went quiet.
Or rather, they stopped making the eminently reasonable argument that Myndich (and Yermak) was never really an independent player, but merely an appendage of Zelensky. Now, listening to them you might sometimes be mistaken for assuming that only Myndich is responsible for corruption in Ukraine. Quite convenient, given that he is ensconced in Israel.
Western-funded Ukrainian journalists confronted Myndich on an Israeli beach last week. Myndich swore up and down that he had been framed and made into a scapegoat. In truth, it’s hard not to agree.
Will we continue hearing the name Myndich in 2026? I highly doubt he will ever be extradited from Israel. There were some recent claims by Kolomoisky that there had been a (possibly Yermak-orchestrated) assassination attempt on Yermak. In fact, I believe that it is most convenient for Zelensky/Yermak if Myndich stays in Israel. There he remains the scapegoat, but without any threat of loose lips, as might happen were he tried in a court of law.
But if political contradictions ever return to Ukraine, say, after some kind of peace deal, I have no doubt that Myndich-gate will erupt once more with true fervor. And this time, Myndich’s connections with both Zelensky and top Ukrainian-Russian FSB spook Andrii Derkach will be highlighted. The security services (SBU) have already recently opened a treason investigation into Myndich for this Russian trace. Taken together, I have no doubt that Zelensky’s many opponents could reasonably hope to sink him with Myndich.
The many Malyuks
The squat spook betrayed everyone and did quite well for himself.
