Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion began, he rarely left Volodymyr Zelensky’s side, whether welcoming foreign dignitaries to Kiev or accompanying the Ukrainian president abroad on important missions to secure military and diplomatic support.
Now, Andriy Yermak’s resignation could be Zelenskiy’s biggest political test since taking office six and a half years ago. While the resignation is likely to go well domestically, it has created uncertainty at the center of the administration at a critical diplomatic point.
Mr Yermak, the former head of the presidential administration, resigned on Friday following a search of his home by anti-corruption officials, apparently becoming the latest and most high-profile victim of Ukraine’s spiraling scandal over alleged kickbacks in the energy sector.
The unrest comes as Ukraine faces pressure from the United States to sign a peace deal widely seen as favoring Russia. Just days earlier, Mr. Yermak had led a Ukrainian team to Geneva to meet with a U.S. delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss the White House’s latest plans.
In announcing his dismissal, President Zelenskiy thanked Ermak for “always representing Ukraine’s position in the negotiations in exactly the right way.”
“It’s always been a patriotic position,” he added.
Yermak’s ouster will likely receive considerable approval among Ukrainians.
Natalya Gumenyuk, director of the independent news outlet Hromadske, told CNN that Yermak had become a highly unpopular figure who had “somehow consolidated dissatisfaction with the president’s misconduct.”
A series of corruption scandals in recent years, a row with a popular former army chief, and the messy introduction of a new mobilization policy all threaten to tarnish President Zelenskiy’s image. However, his approval ratings have remained fairly stable in recent years, although they are down considerably from their 2022 levels.
Olga Rudenko, another journalist with the Kyiv Independent, said Yermak’s resignation was proof of the strength of Ukraine’s democracy.
“Think about it: a young democracy like Ukraine has independent institutions powerful enough to investigate the most powerful people in the country, and they can do so even in wartime,” she wrote to X.
The key question will be whether his resignation will increase domestic pressure on Mr Zelensky himself, or whether it will actually turn the tide.
Gumenyuk said he believed Ukrainians would accept that Zelensky framed his right-hand man’s death as a positive reset for the regime. The president must have been heartened by the fact that members of Congress from his own party, some of whom had threatened to leave the party if Yermak continued in office, issued statements praising Yermak for putting the nation’s interests first.
But former government officials told CNN the decision came too late, arguing that many Ukrainians would now ask what Zelenskiy knew about Yermak’s actions.
“On the one hand, you have his close allies, but on the other you have his close friends and his former business partners,” the official said, referring to both Yermak and Timur Mindić, another man embroiled in the recent scandal. “Do you really think the president didn’t know about this?”
Mr. Yermak’s widespread unpopularity was due to his enormous power as head of the presidential palace, which is not accountable for elections.
“He was the shadow prime minister,” said Olysia Rutsevich of the London-based think tank Chatham House, referring to the person who effectively chose everyone in Zelenskiy’s government.
But Yermak also had fierce loyalty to his superiors.
“There was a lot of co-dependency, they spent a lot of time together… Yermak positioned himself as a negotiator, someone who could not only carry out day-to-day routine tasks, but also solve problems,” Rutsevich said. “He’s a deal maker.”
President Zelenskiy himself said last year of his chief of staff: “I respect his work. He does what I tell him to do.”
Indeed, it seems hard to believe that Ukraine’s leaders will easily find a successor who can place the same level of trust and responsibility.
And that’s before he weighs the war effort against the international situation.
Yermak was scheduled to travel to the United States this weekend to lead the Ukrainian delegation in another round of talks with the Trump administration.
It is unclear who will be the next team leader, but it is clear that Ukraine has a number of senior officials with experience in these very difficult negotiations.
And despite playing such an important role in President Zelenskiy’s diplomatic efforts, Yermak’s reputation abroad is not what it once was. His position has further deteriorated as he has been embroiled in major corruption scandals, especially in the United States, where even the smell of illicit funds is always a major hurdle for many Ukraine supporters in Congress.
A European diplomat based in Kyiv told CNN that Zelenskiy had “little choice but to fire Yermak, given the damaging headlines published by the world media.”
But it is the optics of chaos in the centers of power in Kiev that will perhaps prove most pernicious.
Not surprisingly, Russia is seizing the opportunity to try to undermine President Zelenskiy’s legitimacy.
“The political uncertainty caused by this scandal is growing very rapidly day by day. It is no longer possible to predict what will happen next,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told CNN’s Matthew Chance.
Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister and a key international ally of Ukraine, tied all the threads together and found the situation bleak.
He drew attention to the fact that Yermak’s dismissal came on the same day as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s visit to Moscow and amid what he called a “negotiation mess” with the United States.
“A deadly combination,” he posted on X.
