The Yermak enigma II
Tangled loyalties. Perfidious Albion vs Washington. Soros, Kolomoisky, Pinchuk. Baku, Kabul, Moscow.
You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what’s happening. But they allow it. That’s the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies. — Running Dog, Don Delillo
It’s time to return to the enigma of Andriy Yermak, the all-powerful head of Zelensky’s presidential administration (renamed by Zelensky to the Office of the President - the Office). If Zelensky is the Star, Yermak is the Producer - which is also the field of business he engaged in for decades before hurtling into politics in 2019.
There are many possible angles to the Yermak question.
In my last article on the man, we looked at the theory popular among Ukraine’s western-funded liberal nationalists - that Yermak is a Russian mole.
This theory is largely based on Yermak’s family and business past. Yermak’s father had an important post in the Soviet embassy in Kabul in the 80s, and even stayed there after 1991. Naturally, many have made the obvious point that such a position was impossible without tight connections with the KGB. Ukrainian critics of Yermak have claimed that Yermak’s connections with the Russian elite - which allowed him to take control of negotiations with Moscow in 2019 and ultimately solidify his control of the Office - came from his father.
This link to the East persisted in Andriy Yermak’s business career. The man barely participated in politics until Zelensky’s election in 2019, but had a rich background in law and film production.
And one of his most important business partners was none other than the businessman and philosopher Rakhamim Emanuilov, who worked with Yermak’s father in Kabul. He was Andriy Yermak’s business partner from the mid-90s all the way until 2020.
Emanuilov set up an important financial institution in the 1990s called Interpromtorg, which is also a founding shareholder of Interprombank. Interprombank is an institution whose largest shareholder is Valery Ponomarev, Russia’s richest senator. Other shareholders included Ivan Satchikov, the son-in-law of the late Sergei Prikhodko, former First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Government. Prikhodko and Yermak were also closely acquainted with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. All of these figures are as influential as it gets over in Russia.
It’s also notable that Emanuilov is an Azerbaijani mountain Jew - despite their miniscule size, they play an outsized role in Russian politics. Emanuilov is also friends with fellow Azerbaijani mountain Jew Ilham Ragimov, an influential billionaire and criminologist president Vladimir Putin became tight friends with in university. Ragimov was another shareholder of Interprombank.
These links were constantly brought up by the militarist, NATO-sponsored Ukrainian press in 2019-22 to explain what they believed to be Yermak’s attempts to arrange ‘Ukraine’s capitulation’ - in other words, peace. The hysteria reached fever-pitch during the Wagnergate affair, when MI6-cutout Bellingcat and hawkish Ukrainian spooks riled up nationalist society with the idea that Yermak had intentionally wrecked a Ukrainian covert operation against Russia.
I wrote about that matter here, which threatened to transform into some sort of military coup all the way until 2022. Even in 2024, Yury Butusov, the ultra-militarist, anti-Zelensky journalist who played a major role in stirring up the affair, still believes that Zelensky is trying to silence those who criticized the president and Yermak for Wagnergate.
While it’s quite entertaining, suffice to say that I’m not quite convinced that Yermak is a Russian spy. Maybe he is. But he’s also quite a lot more than that. Today, we’ll take a look at theories that Yermak is in fact London’s militarist agent of influence.
This is of particular interest in the current conjuncture, when it appears that Washington is more intent on reaching a peace deal than London, which seems determined to drag out the war as long as possible. Yermak, which the American press has described as being despised by both Republicans and Democrats, may indeed be playing Britain’s game - through his stalwart obsession with rejecting any ‘capitulation’ peace. Take, for instance, one of his latest telegram statements, hardly in step with Trump’s rhetorical desire for peace through compromise:
"Peace through force — that is what can put an end to this war."
This may also be helpful in understanding Yermak’s conflicts with the ‘pro-American’ David Arakhamia, Kyryllo Budanov, and the anti-corruption organs. All this may be the surface reflection of a deeper shadow war between London and Washington, a transatlantic drama that has been waged for centuries.
But today I won’t only be looking at Trump’s supposed British ties. We’ll also look at what I believe most important about Yermak - his status as a man deeply embedded in Ukraine’s deep state of skilled political operators. He is surrounded by opportunistic and intelligent figures from the era of the Yanukovych presidency, often misleadingly described as ‘pro-Russian’.
These shadowy figures constituting the modern Ukrainian elite are easily misunderstood, especially by those preferring one-dimensional descriptions. Yermak, like his grey enforcer Oleg Tatarov and the oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, are just as comfortable having lunch with George Soros or Bill Clinton as they are doing business with Russia.
Our examination of Yermak’s friends will also bring us to his advisor Mikhailo Podolyak, the iconoclastic businessman Igor Kolomoisky, and the immortal court schemer Sergei Levochkin. Finally, we’ll examine one of the final films Yermak produced, aided by Ukrainian budget money - ‘the Slavs’.
Hence, the topic of today’s article is much deeper than western conspiracies - it is a matter of the fundamentally pliable, double- or triple-dealing nature of the Ukrainian elite, a skill it has cultivated over centuries located at the interstices of global geopolitics.
