Who is Yermak? 2019. Putler, Drumpf, Manafort and Hunter

Green and Orange creates brown. Part I

Under western eyes

Andrii Yermak, head of Ukraine’s president’s office, has received quite a lot of coverage in the western press lately. The May 18 Wapo article on him summed up the general tone:

Carnegie published an article on him on April 15:

Yermak made it to the 2024 Time 100 list, though his supposed boss Zelensky didn’t. Politico included him in its ‘class of 2024’, Europe’s most influential people, describing him as Ukraine’s ‘green cardinal’. Zelensky means green in slavic languages, Yermak often wears camo green, and green was Zelensky/s 2019 election color, as well as the color of his party.

But I’d also note that Zelensky’s most vigorous haters, particularly in the pro-western, nationalist Poroshenko camp, call Zelensky ‘the green power’. And Yermak is their favorite whipping boy when it comes to odiously corrupt Russian agents. Yermak, by the way, is also of a Jewish background. So I wouldn’t say it’s particularly flattering to call Yermak the ‘green cardinal’.

Businessinsider had a particularly pessimistic article on him in December 2023:

Indeed, much coverage has been negative. I’ve written here at length here about how just how worried western media is about Yermak’s centralization of power away from western allies. In short, in conditions of faltering aid from the west, Yermak no longer sees the need to keep around annoying anti-corruption warriors beholden to western capitals.

But western perceptions, however important, aren’t today’s topic. Our task is simpler, but far more complex - what is the essence of Yermak?

The Yermak mystery

On June 25, Ukrainska Pravda, the local version of the New York Times, published another long article on Yermak. I say another, because they had a much longer one about his whole life story a couple years back. This time, the focus was wartime Yermak, his management style, the nature of his relationship to Zelensky, and just why and how he has been able to gather so much power.

The article begins by comparing Yermak’s initial mystery with his present success. When Zelensky was elected back in 2019, few people in Ukraine knew who the key figures in his cabinet were, particularly Yermak.

It argues that you can illustrate Yermak with two photos. The first being that of Yermak and the aforementioned figures after Zelensky’s inauguration. The author draws attention to Yermak - standing behind everyone else in black sunglasses. Apparently even after victory, many in Zelensky’s team had no idea who he was.

The second photo is from 16 June 2024, the Geneva conference. Here, Yermak is at the center, ‘even crowding out Kamala Harris’. Yermak’s obsession with foreign policy initiatives is a major topic of the article. I’d add that ‘initiatives’ is perhaps inaccurate, since it indicates some kind of productive end goal, rather than being events whose mediatization is their raison d’etre. The article has a fascinating metaphor for the relationship between Yermak and Zelensky, one I will explore in more detail in the next article - ‘the Producer and the Star’.

So just who was Yermak when he came to power? While he had no political background, he had long known Zelensky through show business. Zelensky, of course, was a famous TV comedian and actor, in charge of the the Kvartal 95 Studio. Several figures from Kvartal would enter Zelensky’s new government. Yermak was a media lawyer and had business links with Sanahunt, an elite boutique beloved by Zelensky’s Kvartal clique.

Zelensky in his Kvartal days. His comedic talents were in particular demand in Russia, where he made much of his money, famously playing on Russia’s largest state TV channel Rossiya 1 for the country’s celebrity elite on New Years 2013.

Yermak’s emotional approach

At first, due to how little-known he was, he was given the meagre position of ‘assistant to the president’, not even first assistant. But the Ukrainska Pravda article argues that this was to Yermak’s benefit.

According to the authors, while other cabinet members worried about their actual posts, Yermak focused on ‘the only important resource - personal access to Zelensky’. An anonymous member of Zelensky’s first team told this to Ukrainska Pravda:

He would sometimes very demonstratively show that he was there "only for the sake of his great friend." For example, we are flying on a plane, everyone is sitting nearby. And Yermak starts almost shouting, "Oh, my friend, I will do everything for him." Everyone exchanged glances: why are you shouting, he can hear you anyway.

It was reminiscent of when you transfer to a new school, find the coolest senior, and try to become friends with him to gain authority.

Another source elaborated on Yermak’s penchant for ‘emotional connection’ to put it diplomatically:

He tried to fill the space next to the president with his presence.

For example, there were some international negotiations over the phone. There is a special room for this, with Zelensky's desk, and next to it a chair for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative to be nearby if needed. A bit further in the room, there is a couch where other people sit. For instance, Bohdan would sit there. At that time, Prystaiko from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was sitting next to Zelensky.

Then Yermak comes in, walks straight to the desk, sees there is no space there, and simply sits on the edge of the desk next to Zelensky. The main thing is to be close.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, all that matters for Zelensky is emotional closeness. Lacking Yermak’s talents, other old friends from Zelensky’s Yermak days, like Sergei Shefir, were steadily edged out of the President’s Office by Yermak’s ever-expanding network. The next article will go into such process in more detail, but now onto Yermak’s favored vector, according to Ukrainska Pravda, of satisfying Zelensky’s appetite for unconventional, ‘non-bureaucratic decisions’ - foreign policy.

Putler agent?

Lacking any formal responsibilities, Yermak could take control of the most sensitive projects that Zelensky personally hungered. The first of those was POW exchanges. Ukrainska Pravda claims that Yermak’s launch into big politics began on 7 March 2019, when he personally managed an important prisoner exchange.

This Ukrainska Pravda article is quite valuable because it embodies several classic accusations against Yermak made by the liberal pro-western/western-funded press in Ukraine.

First of all, that Yermak was acting as a ‘kremlin agent’. The article writes that Yermak began communicating with the Russians shortly before the March prisoner exchange. These ‘half-secret’ meetings were organized by no one other than the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. Yermak went to Moscow in the ‘reply visit’ after a Russian delegation visited.

Kolomoisky had been open about his support for Zelensky, and his media empire did much to propagandize Zelensky during the elections. I wrote here about how Kolomoisky and other formerly militantly pro-western oligarchs ‘switched allegiances’ (a too-strong term, but no matter) around 2016 and began supporting the Minsk agreements to bring peace to Ukraine and weaken nationalist extremists, all out of fairly basic business interests. Bringing Zelensky to power instead of the by-then nationalist hawk Poroshenko (though he, too, came to power in 2014 on the basis of doveish pacifism…) was meant to expedite this process.

In any case, Yermak was invited along to Moscow, which, according to Ukrainska Pravda, was somewhat coincidental - ‘Putin thought he had a beautiful surname’. Recall that at this point, Yermak had the lowly post of presidential aide.

At this point, Ukrainska Pravda naturally whines about Yermak’s role in agreeing to the ‘Steinmeier formula’. The Steinmeier formula was simply restatement of Germany’s foreign minister’s restatement of the Minsk agreements, made in 2016.

But when Zelensky publicly stated on October 1 2019 that Ukraine would implement them, Ukraine’s liberal-nationalist ‘civil society’ (read: a pampered echo chamber representing about a fifth of the population, fed on foreign funds and despising most of its own citizens) entered a psychotic fit. The nationalists threatened to kill Zelensky, excellently described on Moss Robeson’s blog. And the liberal press frantically published articles on how Zelensky is ‘capitulating to Moscow’. According to Ukrainska Pravda, it was because of these events that ‘the narrative according to which ‘Yermak is a Russian agent’ appeared’.

What I found particularly interesting in the Ukrainska Pravda piece on Yermak is how his psychology is described.

Anyway, the rapid "success story" turned into years of monotonous and fruitless "Minsk meetings" for Yermak.

"Yermak comes from the milieu of Kyivan lawyers. It's an environment where you can negotiate or settle anything. And that was our main mistake when we believed that Putin was genuinely open to conversation. He only needed us to surrender," recalls one of the participants of the Paris delegation in a conversation with UP.

Drumpf agent?

The second tiger Yermak tried to ride was US domestic politics. The UP article claims that Yermak played an active role in urging Zelensky to interfere on the side of Donald Trump against his Democratic Party enemies. Green Man on the side of the dreaded Orange Man. According to chatgpt, this ‘typically results in a brownish color with an earthy, muted tone’.

The ‘non-traditional diplomacy’ that Yermak persuaded Zelensky try involved a low-key meeting with Rudy Giulani in late August 2019, which was nevertheless reported on by the NYT.

The NYT wrote that Giulani’s first interest vis a vis Mr Yermak was as to whether Ukrainian officials ‘took steps in the 2016 election to damage Mr. Trump’s campaign’. This refers to the Paul Manafort case. If you aren’t lucky enough to have a family member whose main window to the world is NPR, Manafort was a former Trump aide accused of various sundry links with the Slavic Mordor (Russia), which, astonishingly enough, actually snaked their way through Manafort’s friends in the Slavic Rivendell (Ukraine).

Here is chatgpt’s best attempt, though it seems to have serious problems with the concept that Ukraine has traditionally been considered as south of Russia

No doubt not without some pride, UP put a hyperlink to its own May 2016 article on the topic, authored by arch-Sorosite, Serhiy Leshchenko. Pride, because it was this article, among others authored by the NGO ecosystem sponsored by the Democrat Party in Ukraine, that stirred up the Manafort brew back then. And Leshchenko in his article relied on sources in the Ukrainian special services, namely one ex-deputy head of the SBU Viktor Trepak.

Leshchenko earned Giulani’s ire for releasing the Manafort materials. In an interview to Fox News, he justified his cancellation of a trip to Ukraine on the basis of Leshchenko:

I'm not going to go because I think I'm walking into a group of people that are enemies of the president, in some cases, enemies of the United States. And in one case already convicted person who has found to be involved in assisting of the Democrats in the 2016 elections... Gentleman by the name of Leschenko who supplied a Blackbook that was found to be fraudulent

While Leshchenko was once a deputy in Poroshenko’s party, nowadays, funnily enough, he is quite friendly to the Zelensky government. He’s currently an advisor to the president and earns a great deal of money as a member of the state railway company’s advisory council.

The second topic that Giulani quizzed Yermak on during their multiple meetings was Hunter Biden’s possible misdeeds during his time at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Hunter joined the board of directors of Burisma in 2014 under the venal oligarch Mykola Zlochecsky. Hunter began right after Ukraine’s ‘revolution of dignity’, with his time at the company ending in April 2019.

Luckily for Hunter, he received $50,000 a month while hard at work in Burisma. In the same time period, the share of Ukrainians earning less than $300 a month rose from 54% to 85% of the population, with disposable income annihilated by obscene energy bills, constantly urged by the US and IMF as conditions for further loans and military aid.

I would also note that when Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach released scandalous tapes of Joe Biden and former president Petro Poroshenko’s Burisma-related conversations, it was quite clear that it was sanctioned by Zelensky. Zelensky was elected in large part on the promise that he would ‘chuck the corruptioners in the slammer’, referring principally to Poroshenko.

At the time, Zelensky said that the contents of the leaked conversations could ‘be perceived, qualified as treason’, which in turn earned Poroshenko’s rage, who accused the Green Government of being behind the leaks. In a recent interview, Derkach was quite open about the fact that the Zelensky government was quite interested in using the leaks to further its own agenda, but didn’t have the guts to continue when Washington started turning up the pressure.

And the MPs involved in the Derkach tapes were all Kolomoisky-linked, such as Oleksandr Dubinsky, who would later be sanctioned by the US government for his involvement. Kolomoisky had quite a lot of bones to pick with the Democratic Party of the USA by this point, as symbolized by the endless attempt by the IMF to get the Ukrainian government to nationalize his sprawling PrivatBank empire. And as I’ve written here, Dubinsky remains imprisoned in Ukraine on the grounds of ‘state treason by damaging relations with our strategic partner’ - the Derkach tapes.

Anyway, Ukrainska Pravda finishes this section by simply noting that ‘luckily, this situation didn’t end for Ukraine with any serious diplomatic consequences’. That the Ukrainian elite retained Democratic Party suzerainty over it was no doubt a great success.

As was the fact that slimy lawyers like Yermak didn’t get the chance to actually return Ukraine to peace through the Minsk Agreements and avoid a catastrophic full-scale war with Russia. Luckily, the Sorosites and Azovites won and the lawyers lost. Or rather, that very same lawyer and his Big Green Man decided to place their bets on the nationalist horse, and ride even more aggressively than its most ‘sincere’ proponents.

This horse, once unleashed, would even trample over Zelensky’s old sponsor, Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky no longer has time to concoct devious combinations against the Democrats using putative pawns like Yermak or Giulani - he has been in custody since September 2023. There is no space for Ukraine’s old oligarchy in the new Ukraine. In the new Ukraine, all that’s needed are scam call centres, liberal-nationalist media warriors, and plenty of subservient cannon fodder. And, of course, whatever Yermak and Zelensky are.

In the next article on the topic of Yermak, we’ll be looking at how Yermak became more and more powerful during the war, and the peculiarities of his unique relationship with Zelensky. Stay tuned.