The game plan of Zelenskyy's powerful chief of staff

Everybody remembers Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy being roasted by Donald Trump’s MAGA loyalists for wearing his combat gear in the now-notorious Oval Office meeting in February.

But most have probably already forgotten the immaculate suit of the man sitting on the sofa to Zelenskyy’s right, his imposing Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak. Was Yermak thinking his boss should have followed his sartorial lead? Was he thinking he could have kept his temper and done a better job on the biggest political stage?

If that’s what he was thinking, he’d never admit it.

In fact, he told POLITICO it was his boss who told him to wear the suit.

“That was probably my first suit since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. It even felt a little unfamiliar, but I’m getting used to it,” he wrote in an email exchange. And what was on his mind during the brutal spat? The priority was simply to convince the Americans that it was in their strategic interests to help stop the Russians, Yermak explained. Not the slightest hint he was ready to grab the wheel as negotiations skidded across ice.

The response is typical of Yermak. The once little-known lawyer and B-movie producer — now in the thick of triangular peace diplomacy with the Americans and Russians — is always reverently loyal to his boss. In an interview with POLITICO last year, he referred to him glowingly as the “president of the people.” What else could he say? Yermak has ridden Zelenskyy’s coattails to become the second-most-powerful figure in Ukraine — even a co-equal.

Into the limelight

Yermak’s profile is only set to grow in the coming months. He’s come a long way since producing martial arts movie “The Fight Rules” and smuggling thriller “The Line.”

He is now at the spearhead of Ukrainian diplomacy, and is trying to find ways to keep the thin-skinned Trump supporters sweet, partly with sharp tailoring.

In talks in Istanbul in May, Yermak led the charge talking with allies and stayed out of the direct discussions with the Russians. Russia only sent a low-level delegation, but the 53-year-old consigliere from Kyiv coordinated positions with the U.S., U.K., France and Germany, and took the lead insisting an unconditional ceasefire must be the priority.

This week he travels to Washington seeking to exploit Trump’s frustrations with Vladimir Putin for the recent massive air raids on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv. Trump expressed his irritation with the Russian leader last week for the air strikes, accusing him of having gone crazy and threatened to impose more economic sanctions on Russia. “Sanctions are the main priority” for Yermak on this trip, one of his aides told POLITICO. 

The question as he comes to the fore is: What’s his game? As he shuttles to Western capitals to press Ukraine’s case, some critics hazard he is seizing the opportunity to burnish his own credentials for the future.

This he firmly denies. “I entered politics together with Volodymyr Zelenskyy — and I will leave together with him,” he told POLITICO. “My task is to help him fulfill his responsibilities as the president of Ukraine. For me, this is not about positions or political careers.”

For now, at least, Yermak is Zelenskyy’s trusted right-hand man, and not a successor. And even fierce opponents concede the steely former attorney is a good fit as Ukraine’s interlocutor with Trump’s transactional entourage.

“He reads Trump’s people better than Zelenskyy does,” said opposition lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi, a member of former President Petro Poroshenko’s party.

Normally Kniazhytskyi hasn’t a good word to say about Yermak, but he noted “Zelenskyy hasn’t adapted enough” to the massive change in politics in Washington, while Yermak seems more alive to it.

“Zelenskyy’s mindset hasn’t altered and he still hasn’t understood the rhetoric that was effective when Joe Biden was in the White House isn’t of much use now,” he added.

Will the real Yermak please stand up?

But who is he really? Who is the man that Zelenskyy will depend on to sit opposite the unsentimental real estate investor and lawyer Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, to try to manage an administration that sees Ukraine as a nuisance in a bigger game of rapprochement with the Russians?

Yermak has been accused of being everything from a Russian spy — a charge linked to lingering questions about whether his father was a Russian intelligence officer — to a dangerous Svengali or a Rasputin who has Zelenskyy under his spell. The Rasputin comparison is wide of the mark. The bachelor Yermak may be physically imposing like Rasputin but he’s a teetotaler and steely pragmatist rather than debauched mystic.

The skill Yermak probably does share with the faith healer who bewitched the imperial family of Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar, is as a shrewd reader of psychology. That’s something highlighted by the half dozen former Ukrainian ministers and aides POLITICO spoke with about Yermak. Aside from one, they all spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearful of crossing Zelenskyy’s right-hand man. There’s certainly a ubiquitous sense in Kyiv you have to tread carefully when dealing with him, or even talking about him.

“Yermak is a brilliant psychologist. He’s able to read Zelenskyy and anticipate what he wants,” said a former minister, who clashed bitterly with Yermak and was increasingly squeezed out by him before being forced to resign amid threats. “He’s careful to offer ready-made solutions to Zelenskyy, who hates being drawn into details, and he doesn’t bring him problems,” he added.

Frequently described by Ukrainian commentators as the producer in the ruling duopoly with the former TV comic Zelenskyy as the performing star, the clam-like relationship between the pair has evolved from Yermak’s initial appointment to the president’s office in a junior role five years ago.

His rise was meteoric.

Rising star

When appointed as an aide shortly after the 2019 election, none of the key figures in Zelenskyy’s circle had much of an inkling about Yermak. They had all enjoyed long friendships with Zelenskyy and helped him found his production company Kvartal 95 Studio and develop his “Servant of the People” TV series, a show that shot him to fame and eventually propelled him into the presidency. They included Serhiy Trofimov, Serhiy Shefir, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, Yuriy Kostiuk and Ivan Bakanov, who was quickly moved to head the security service.

Now they’re all gone, and Yermak’s critics point to the chief of staff as engineering the purges and reshuffles that set them on their way. Shefir, who’d been a friend of Zelenskyy’s for more than three decades, only knew he was out on arriving at the presidential building in Bankova Street in Kyiv to find someone else ensconced in his office with his effects neatly packed in a box.

“Yermak stuck to Zelenskyy the moment he arrived at Bankova Street,” said Yulia Mendel, a Ukrainian journalist who served as Zelenskyy’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021. And he quickly outmaneuvered Andriy Bohdan, Zelenskyy’s first head of office, a former personal lawyer for Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch who’d backed Zelenskyy’s presidential run and would later be dropped and arrested on corruption charges.

“They were always in the underground gym — that’s where they really bonded as gym buddies. And he stole a march on Bohdan by arranging the first big POW swap with the Russians,” she said. That was in September 2019. Yermak’s star rose quickly after he stepped off the plane at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport with freed Ukrainian sailors who had been held captive by Russia.

Five months later, he was catapulted to head of office and accrued ever more power, clearing out the cabinet and the office of the president of anyone reckoned a political threat or who sought to act autonomously, the former ministers and officials said.

Outshining either Zelenskyy or Yermak in media coverage also seemed to lead to unceremonious ejection.

Yermak and Zelenskyy are well-suited, coming from similar backgrounds. They’re scions of middle-class families who valued education and hard work. Both trained as lawyers — in Yermak’s case at Ukraine’s largest university Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv — and both moved over to the entertainment industry. Yermak founded a media company and produced movies, while also working as a copyright lawyer.

They got to know each other around 2011, when Zelenskyy became the general producer of a TV channel and Yermak did some legal work for him. Subsequently, Yermak worked on Zelenskyy’s 2019 Servant of the People election campaign but not in a high-profile capacity.

Some of Yermak’s biography is glossed over, according to Mendel. After graduating in the rough-and-tumble of the post-Soviet 1990s he grabbed gigs where he could — at one time working for a notorious nightclub-cum-discotheque in the Ukrainian capital, the first to appear after the collapse of communism. The club attracted gangsters as well as prominent pro-Russian politicians. He later acted as a fixer for the Sanahunt luxury clothing store, helping to import exclusive lines from top fashion houses in France and Italy for the store’s clients of oligarchs and politicians. “That role was extremely important in shaping Yermak’s network of connections,” said Mendel.

Being highly attuned to power and seizing opportunities have served Yermak well despite his unprepossessing start. In Bankova Street he’s been in his element, former ministers said.

“He has a mental connection with Zelenskyy,” said another former longtime friend of the Ukrainian leader, who has also had a top government job until he fell foul of Yermak.

“Yermak made sure he was present at every meeting I had with Zelenskyy, listening, interjecting. Or Yermak would just sit there and scroll through his phone and show Zelenskyy something and crack a private joke with raised eyebrows. In time I just stopped going to meetings and communicated just by email,” he told POLITICO.

Center of power

Yermak quickly expanded his role and surrounded himself with people beholden to him, among them a coterie of unpaid advisers who owe allegiance solely to him.  Some have been suspects in corruption cases, prematurely closed down on the orders of Oleh Tatarov, a key deputy in the presidential administration who reports to Yermak. Tatarov, a Ukrainian lawyer, worked in the interior ministry during the regime of Viktor Yanukovych but was dismissed after the Maidan uprising only to reappear in Bankova Street in 2022.

Few top officials have managed to cling on if Yermak has wanted them gone. One standout has been Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, who’s maintained independent access to Zelenskyy, say Bankova Street insiders, to the frustration of Yermak.

The purges and reshuffles have done nothing to ease long-standing worries about Zelenskyy’s highly personalized and, according to some, autocratic way of governing. Zelenskyy has little time for formal ways of governing or institutions. Everything is highly personal, improvised and often impetuous. “Zelenskyy and Yermak have undermined institutions, and they’ve developed governance based on people they trust,” Kniazhytskyi said.

The departures of some highly gifted figures from the cabinet or the military, including Dmytro Kuleba as foreign minister and Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the army commander who clashed with Zelenskyy over war strategy, have prompted domestic alarm. The monopolization of power has triggered quiet dismay of Western allies, who are reticent to issue public criticism for fear of handing propaganda openings for Moscow.

“We don’t have a proper functioning Cabinet of ministers. Instead, we have some quasi-Cabinet of ministers headed by Yermak, who controls access to the president’s agenda and to the president himself. Then you have all these strange advisers, who are not public officials, who are not on the state payroll, and who don’t have to submit asset declarations,” said Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center NGO.

“Oligarchs are no longer Ukraine’s main domestic problem. Even corruption isn’t the main problem. The main problem is the system of governance and how power has been monopolized,” Kaleniuk added in a recent interview.

Yermak gave short shrift to the criticism.

“These accusations are not true,” he said. “My task is to ensure the effective functioning of the presidential office and to support the head of state in fulfilling his constitutional powers. This is not a separate vertical of power but a working tool of the president. Especially during wartime, when decisions must be made quickly and clearly,” he told POLITICO.

“The president has the right to rely on those he trusts and on those who are capable of working without days off and without self-pity. I am grateful for this trust, and I do everything I can to ensure that the team functions as a single mechanism under extremely difficult circumstances,” he added.

He went on: “Is it easy to build an effective system? No. Do we make mistakes? Of course we do. Because in the end, we are human. We acknowledge that and respond accordingly. As for the myths about ‘total control’ — they are built on simplifications. The state is a complex structure where powers are always distributed. Even with the greatest desire, it is physically impossible to centralize everything. Ukraine has no historical tradition of authoritarian rule — society simply would not allow it. And President Zelenskyy understands this very well.”

For all the criticism, Yermak has notched up some considerable successes for Ukraine during the war, and is credited, among other things, with being the driving force in persuading allies to adopt sanctions on Russia. Zelenskyy’s supporters say in wartime there’s no option but to centralize power to get quick decision-making.

Vaulting ambition?

Is the producer now thinking about his turn as the star? It wouldn’t be surprising if his thoughts are turning to a political life independent of Zelenskyy. A former minister has no doubt that an operator as shrewd as Yermak must be thinking about a post-Zelenskyy future. “He has this exceptionally high ambition and the only thing he really craves for is recognition,” the former minister said.

“Andriy can be charming, but he’s guided by an overwhelming drive to have his greatness recognized. He’ll tell you that for him public recognition is nothing. That he only cares for the country. And that even if his name disappeared it wouldn’t matter. But this is all bullshit. He almost suffers physically if he gets sidelined and his name has to be on everything.”

“Right now, any conversation about the future after the war is inappropriate,” Yermak said. “As long as the fight continues, talking about personal political plans is simply irresponsible. All resources, time, and efforts must be focused on one thing — stopping Russian aggression. If we don’t do that, no political scenario will matter.”

Whether he ever could succeed Zelenskyy, though, strikes Ruslan Bortnik a political scientist and director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics, as doubtful. “Yermak hasn’t any political future without Zelenskyy. He’s not popular and has no real support from the elites. He’s a temporary person,” he said.

Maybe so, but in the meantime much of Ukraine’s future is in his hands.