The Yermak enigma I
Russian agent? Scheming court viziers. History of the Office. KGB in Kabul. Azeri mountain Jews. Wrestling. Anaphylactic shock in Forte dei Marmi.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing.
Today’s article is about a true enigma of Ukrainian politics. Zelensky’s most wonderful pal. According to the Financial Times, they even sleep in the same bunker room.
Andrey Yermak. Perhaps the most powerful man in Ukraine. Zelensky’s producer.
In the context of the latest wave of rumors about Ukraine peace talks, what better time to take a closer look at Ukraine’s most important diplomat - not that he’s ever occupied any formal diplomatic posts.
Yermak has been the subject of countless hit-pieces in the western media. The recent attempt to remove the independence of the western-created anti-corruption organs led to a spike in such anti-Yermak content. USAID-funded Ukrainian media name Yermak as the mastermind of the July 23 anti-NABU law. Yermak, however, also had the gall to congratulate parliament for voting through the second law repealing the first law.
However, this recent anti-Yermak content is hardly the first of its kind.
Back in 2021, the MI6 cutout Bellingcat was hard at work forming the narrative that ‘Yermak is a Russian agent’ conspiring with the Kremlin to bring about Ukraine’s ‘capitulation’. Ukrainian liberal nationalists (particularly those around ex-president Petro Poroshenko) constantly cited said Bellingcat pieces in their attempt to engineer some sort of coup or anti-Yermak/Zelensky mass movement. I wrote about the affair here.
One of the highlights was when Vasily Burba, head of the Main Intelligence Directorate until 2020, thunderously announced in late 2021 that ‘we have a mole in our highest positions working for Russia’. He claimed that this mole had leaked information on Ukrainian covert operations to Russia. This was taken by most to refer to Yermak. Yermak had told Burba to delay a major anti-Russian covert op back in July 2020, leading to the failure of said operation (the entire affair became known as ‘Wagnergate’).
Defining Yermak
But what really is Yermak?
When Zelensky won the presidency in 2019, Yermak had the fairly lowly role of presidential advisor. The country’s journalists and politicians had never heard of the man.
But by February 2020, Yermak had managed to take control of the crucial position of head of the Office of the President.
This post does not exist in the Ukrainian constitution. Historically, however, there have always been Yermak figures - theoretically secretaries, in reality wielding unlimited power. Perhaps this is dictated by the chaotic nature of Ukrainian politics, where the equidistant power of rival oligarchic clans paralyzes policy. A grey cardinal is necessary to move past democratic deadlock.
Thus, instead of parliament or the cabinet of ministers, Ukrainian presidents have always ended up relying on an all-powerful Yermak figure. The institute has had two names - originally it was the Presidential Administration. until 2019, when Zelensky renamed it the Office of the President. It is often known as Bankova, for the street on which it is located.
No matter what the name of the institution, each president’s powerful chief schemer has always topped ratings of most unpopular public figure. Polls show Yermak is distrusted by 61% of Ukrainians.
President Kuchma (1994-2005) had Dmitry Tabachnik and, later, Viktor Medvedchuk (who remained highly influential in Ukrainian politics until his deportation to Russia in 2022). In liberal nationalist circles, these two men are considered the greatest villains of post-soviet Ukrainian history.
But the pro-western President Yuschenko (2005-2010) had Viktor Baloga. Baloga’s family is a powerful clan that has controlled politics in the smuggling-ridden western Zakkarpattya region ever since the 1990s.
President Yanukovych (2010-2014) had Sergei Levochkin. Levochkin remains an extremely powerful play today, both because of his complex political networks, and his partial ownership of the Inter media company. I’ve written here and here about Levochkin’s modern relations with Yermak and his team.
President Poroshenko (2014-2019) had Boris Lozhkin. While his tycoon boss made a big show of ‘fighting against corruption and the oligarchy’, fellow oligarch Lozhkin kept busy conducting secret meetings with the country’s business elite. Western-funded media constantly moaned about Lozhkin - he demonstrated that Ukraine had yet to ‘transition to a civilized market economy’ (ie, castrate domestic capital and totally open markets to western imports).
These viziers created their own informal power networks, both skirting and controlling formal seats of power. Ministers and other official holders of office turned into mere executors of the will of the all-powerful Office/Administration/Bankova.
Yermak is hence simply the latest representative of an illustrious breed.
Nevertheless, all accounts agree that he has centralized power in the country to an unprecedented extent in Ukrainian history. He has apparently been offered all sort of official posts in the cabinet of ministers and elsewhere - he turned them down. He prefers to possess undefined powers.
I’ve written about Yermak before. In that article, I focused on his strategy of emotional closeness to Zelensky, as well as his rise to power through his unofficial role as top negotiator with Moscow. It was this latter role that first led to liberal nationalists calling him a ‘Russian agent’, precisely because of their fear that Yermak would come to some kind of dastardly agreement with Moscow. By capitulation, of course, they meant implementing the Minsk agreements that Ukraine signed in 2015, thereby returning the ‘treasonous’ pro-Russian, anti-NATO breakaway eastern regions to the Ukrainian body politic.
Yermak’s power has always been in his emotional capacities, his ability to finely attune himself to the capricious mood swings of his boss. Before Zelensky won the presidency in 2019, Yermak was a relatively successful film producer - the favored metaphor of his relationship with Zelensky is that of the star and the producer.
Instead of boring bureaucracy, Yermak has always been good at delivering Zelensky what he wants - fast decisions that make for good PR. Maybe they aren’t ideal in the long run, but that isn’t the point.
Yermak has always focused on two main roles.
First, his various diplomatic efforts. As we’ll see in today’s article, his time in the Office has allowed him to finally put to practice the diplomatic education he received in the 90s.
His projects in this realm have always bypassed the ministry of foreign affairs, to the impotent frustration of foreign ministers Vadym Pristaiko (2019-2020) and Dmytro Kuleba (2020-2024). Nowadays, the ministry is under control of Yermak loyalist Andriy Sybiha.
Examples of Yermak’s diplomacy are his various secret and semi-secret negotiations with Russia in the 2019-20 period, his 2020 secret talks with Rudy Giulani, his semi-entertaining 2024 ‘Geneva Peace Summit’ charade, and his ongoing shuttle diplomacy with the Americans and just about everyone else. The press photo from the Geneva Peace summit famously featured Yermak eclipsing Kamala Harris.
His diplomatic genius hasn’t been particularly appreciated, however.
Yermak’s international activities seem to have been of his own volition. According to the western-financed Ukrainska Pravda, Yermak’s role in the Russia negotiations of 2019 was not agreed upon by the US embassy. In UP’s servile atlanticist mind, this is a condemnation.
Second, choosing cadres. Yermak doesn’t care that much about actual domestic politics, he finds it boring - paperwork isn’t very appealing to Zelensky. But it is important for him that his Office is full of loyal puppets.
Correspondingly, he spends much of his time whispering to Zelensky suspicious facts about anyone not entirely loyal to Yermak. Ukrainian media quotes a running joke in the corridors of power that ‘Zelensky, as president, has the power to choose which of Yermak’s candidates to give official posts’.
It is worth dwelling on the fact that Yermak seems somewhat apolitical. His main goal seems to be control. That’s why the people that Yermak brings to office are such a motley bunch. On the one hand you have radical eugenicist neoliberals like Halyna Tretyakova, the social policy official who called to sterilize the unemployed so as to reduce the number of ‘low-quality children’. On the other hand, Yermak surrounds himself with people from Yanukovych’s supposedly ‘pro-Russian, pro-soviet’ administration. What matters isn’t the politics, it’s loyalty.
Yermak also fought a long battle to take control of the cabinet of ministers, which he finally won in mid-July of this year. After literally years of rumors, Yermak’s pet Yuliya Sviridenko became prime minister. Denys Shmyhal, the man she replaced, lacked any political ambitions, which is why he stayed in his post a record 5 years.
However, the fact that Shmyhal still wasn’t entirely under Yermak’s control annoyed him, particularly because of a number of signs that Shmyhal was cooperating with Yermak’s last real competitor in the Zelensky elite, head of Zelensky’s parliamentary fraction David Arakhamia.
Anyway, that’s the standard view of Yermak put forward by Ukrainian liberal media - a control freak with a fixation on diplomatic stunts.
Now, I wanted to look at something a bit sexier - Yermak’s spookier side. It’s impossible not to indulge in such an approach, given what a total no-name Yermak was in Ukrainian politics back in 2019, and what stratospheric heights he has reached since.
There are four conspiratorial approaches to the Yermak enigma.
The first is the Kremlin angle. The second is that Yermak is an agent of British influence. The third is Yermak as an oligarchic puppet. The last approach is to see Yermak as the latest representative of the decades-old Ukrainian deep state - equally pro-western, pro-Russian, and pro-oligarch.
Today we’ll take a look at the first, most popular theory of Yermak’s allegiances. It will take us from the KGB’s operations in 1980s Kabul to the Azerbaijani mountain Jews that occupy an outsized role in modern Russian politics. Olympic wrestling champions. And finally, the mysterious 2019 poisoning of a Russo-Ukrainian socialite in an Italian resort town.
