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Hours after Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency searched his premises, Andriy Yermak resigned as head of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Office on 28 November. Zelenskyy accepted the resignation that evening, framing it as a “reset” ahead of negotiations.
Ukraine’s second-most powerful man had become so toxic as to be called “a figure impossible to save” by Bohdan Yaremenko, an MP from Zelenskyy’s own party.
Four months earlier, teenagers with cardboard signs saved the investigation that brought him down.
They flooded streets across the country when Zelenskyy’s team attempted to subordinate Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies in July 2025. Their handmade signs read “F*ck corruption” and “We’re fighting for Ukraine, not for your impunity.” Within ten days, parliament voted 331-0 to reverse the law against the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU).
Little did any of NABU’s teenage defenders know that the anti-graft agency they helped save was working on a case that would present a challenge to Zelenskyy’s power second only to Russia’s invasion. Operation Midas, released on 10 November, brought down two ministers by exposing a $100 million nuclear energy money laundering network curated by Zelenskyy’s close associate Tymur Mindich.
“I think this case wouldn’t exist. It would have been definitely destroyed,” NABU Director Semen Krivonos told Radio Svoboda on 19 November, explaining what would have happened without July’s protests.
The man who orchestrated that attack on NABU inadvertently triggered the investigation that would force his own resignation four months later.
Kyivans protest against Zelenskyy’s crackdown on anti-graft agencies, 22 July 2025. Photo: Corrie Nieto
Yermak resigned one day before Miami talks with Trump team
Yermak submitted his resignation one day before he was scheduled to fly to Miami for talks with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner about a Ukraine “peace plan,” according to Axios.
On the NABU recordings, Yermak appears under the codename “Ali-Baba”—giving orders to persecute NABU detectives and allegedly orchestrating the July attack on anti-corruption agencies. Head of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) Oleksandr Klymenko confirmed the existence of a figure by that codename on the recordings.
Despite the scandal, Zelenskyy appointed Yermak to lead Ukraine’s delegation in negotiations with the US and other international partners on reaching peace.
Progress, not victory
Ukrainians who fought for this moment aren’t celebrating. They see progress—but not victory.
Detective Ruslan Mahamedrasulov organized the surveillance that documented Mindich’s alleged scheme. He has been imprisoned for over four months on fabricated espionage charges, accused of selling hemp to Dagestan—a pretext that the Anti-Corruption Action Center, a leading transparency NGO, says was manufactured during July’s crackdown to neutralize the man investigating Zelenskyy’s circle.
Ruslan Mahamedrasulov, head of NABU’s detective unit for Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, at Pechersk District Court on 11 September 2025. Photo: Suspilne News / Nikita Halka
Throughout court hearings, journalists asked if he was investigating Mindich. He refused to confirm, protecting the operation. The investigation succeeded—it brought down ministers, triggered a governmental crisis, forced out the second-most powerful man in Ukraine. The detective remains in prison.
“Not once did the NABU detective confirm this, so as not to put the investigation at risk,” anti-corruption activist Vitaliy Shabunin wrote. “A person was obviously illegally and unjustly detained, and didn’t defend himself so as not to disrupt the operation.”
Anastasia Radina, head of parliament’s Anti-Corruption Committee, called Mahamedrasulov and his elderly father “hostages” and said their release would be “fair.”
Zelenskyy’s evening address showed no acknowledgment of wrongdoing. He framed the resignation as a “reboot” and thanked Yermak for representing Ukraine’s position “exactly as it should be. It was always a patriotic position.”
Mindich fled to Israel hours before NABU arrived to search his apartment. Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko and his deputy resigned. The Tsukerman brothers—alleged intermediaries in the kickback scheme—fled Ukraine. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, the man who approved fabricated charges against NABU detectives investigating Zelenskyy’s circle, remains in office.
Yermak himself faces no charges—at least not yet.
How Yermak accumulated power over five years
Charles Michel, President of the European Council, Prime minister Mark Rutte of Netherlands, Ukraine Head of the presidential Office Andriy Yermak, Vice President Kamala Harris of United States, Swiss Federal President Viola Amherd, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ursula von der Leyen President of European Commission, Swiss Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, left to right, arrive next to other heads of states for the traditional family photo during the Summit on peace in Ukraine, in Stansstad near Lucerne, Switzerland, Saturday, 15 June 2024. (KEYSTONE/EDA/POOL/Michael Buholzer)
Yermak became Ukraine’s most powerful unelected official by systematically accumulating control across every lever of governance. The trajectory was visible from the start—to those who chose to look.
Before joining Zelenskyy, Yermak worked as an unpaid assistant to Elbrus Tedeyev, an MP from the Party of Regions of Ukraine’s disgraced pro-Russian President Yanukovych, ousted during the Euromaidan revolution. He apprenticed in Yanukovych’s authoritarian machine, then built a new one for a different president.
Zelenskyy appointed Yermak as head of the Presidential Office in February 2020. Within weeks, the Capitulation Resistance Movement warned about his proximity to pro-Russian circles.
Within a month, MP Geo Leros published videos alleging Yermak’s brother Denys was trading government positions for payoffs. The State Bureau of Investigations opened criminal proceedings against the whistleblower by morning. Months later, Leros’s car was torched. Days after that, he was expelled from the ruling party.
The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office opened proceedings against the Yermak brothers, uncovering a corruption scheme in port tugboat monopolies. The investigation was halted through Yermak’s directive.
This established the pattern that would repeat for five years: attack the investigators, protect the network.
Despite the early warnings, Yermak’s power only grew. Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party holds 254 of 450 parliamentary seats; sources told the Kyiv Independent that “the President’s Office handpicks ministers and tells lawmakers what laws to support.”
He sidelined Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba—Politico reported Kuleba “irritated Yermak, who wanted more control”—replacing him with his own former deputy. Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi was fired after becoming too popular. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was replaced by another Yermak deputy. Former Presidential Office employees described Zelenskyy and Yermak as “yin and yang”—one entity, not two.
Left: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba; right – President’s Office Head Andrii Yermak. Photo: Kuleba’s Instagram
Through his deputy Oleh Tatarov—a Yanukovych-era official who justified police beatings of Euromaidan protesters and now coordinates all law enforcement—Yermak controlled the justice system. When NABU prepared bribery charges against Tatarov in 2020, the case was buried on technicalities.
Western partners repeatedly warned Zelenskyy about the risks.
“The president has been repeatedly briefed by Western intelligence about the risks associated with Yermak. The Americans were very clear and unambiguous. Zelenskyy had the opportunity to review all the evidence, but stubbornly allowed Yermak to expand his influence,” Liubov Tsybulska wrote in Euromaidan Press on 22 November, relaying what she heard from Western government officials.
By June 2025, US officials described Yermak to Politico as a “bipartisan irritator.” Former Secretary of State Blinken and ex-Ambassador Brink reportedly requested Yermak not be present in meetings with Zelenskyy—requests Zelenskyy rejected.
The system that three revolutions couldn’t fix
Mustafa Nayyem—the journalist whose Facebook post sparked the Euromaidan Revolution in November 2013—responded to Yermak’s resignation with a diagnosis that cut deeper than any single scandal.
“In every system, there’s a point where politics ends and primitive hunger for control over everything begins—from courts and defense contracts to the head of the fish farm and the deputy head of the Vinnytsia Regional Administration,” Nayyem wrote.
“In Ukraine, for many years this point was politely called Bankova, Administration, Office—it doesn’t matter. These are just signs above a place where, for three decades under all presidents, they believe time has stopped, positions are eternal, and the key to success is control—not systems, the ability to hear the other side, and building coalitions.”
The Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andrii Yermak held online meetings with the US Special Representatives Steven Witkoff and Keith Kellogg on 7 May 2025. Credit: the Office of the President
The perversity, Nayyem argued, is that despite three revolutions, a war, and society’s enormous leap forward, presidents still dreamed of building parallel verticals—”rewriting procedures for ‘needed decisions,’ extinguishing those who ask uncomfortable questions, and directly imprisoning those who, as they see it, caused the crisis.”
Scholars have a name for this pattern. Alena Ledeneva’s research on blat—the post-Soviet system of personal networks—explains how survival strategies that made sense under authoritarian systems become democratic poison when transplanted into institutions meant to serve the public.
During Yanukovych’s administration, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka called himself a “member of Yanukovych’s team.” He fled to Russia in February 2014. Three revolutions later, officials who learned governance from that same machine built a new version for a president who promised to be different.
“This is not about one story and not about one person,” Nayyem concluded, “but about a root failure in the decision-making system, where special operations replaced institutions, and the state was replaced by a surname.”
Yermak resigned. The system that made him didn’t.
What Yermak’s resignation means for Ukraine
The resignation removes a figure whom allies found “physically painful” to engage with at high-level meetings. It may open space for more productive negotiations with the Trump administration at a moment when Ukraine desperately needs American support.
But the deeper test remains: whether Ukraine’s institutions—NABU, SAPO, the courts—can complete the investigations and deliver convictions. Ministers fell. A chief of staff fell. Whether anyone actually goes to prison—and the detective who helped expose the scheme gets out of it—depends on what happens next.
In July, teenagers with cardboard signs proved Ukrainian civil society had outgrown its leadership. In November, the independent institutions they saved proved stronger than the patronage networks trying to capture them.
The butterfly effect worked. The question now is whether the caterpillar—Ukraine’s justice system—can complete its transformation.
Explore further
Ukraine faces existential pressure—and still jails the detectives who exposed a $100M corruption scheme
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