Four nights in custody: will Zelenskyy's team change after Yermak's arrest?

Andrii Yermak, former head of the President's Office, looked gloomy and downcast as he left the Lukianivska pre-trial detention centre on 18 May.

He didn't spend that long in detention – only four nights.

But just three or so months ago, the idea of Yermak being arrested while his closest friend, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was still president was something only the boldest political forecasters could have imagined.

By a twist of fate, Yermak spent his first nights in detention alongside a man who had once given his blessing to his entry into truly big-time politics.

Oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskyi has been held for several years in a Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) detention facility in Pechersk, not far from Yermak.

It was in large part thanks to Kolomoiskyi's resources and connections that Zelenskyy became president in 2019. At the time, Andrii Yermak was an unknown lawyer in Kyiv. He could easily have remained so.

But at a certain point in 2019, he was given the role of negotiator with the Russians during the first (then secret) meetings arranged with Kolomoiskyi's involvement.

Had it not been for those negotiations, overseen by Yermak, perhaps his meteoric rise to become the "second-most powerful man in Ukraine" would never have happened.

But that is speculation and "what-ifs", which history does not recognise. What can be said with certainty is that over time, Dnipro's most powerful oligarch fell out of favour with the new president. Kolomoiskyi is now in his third year of being held in detention on charges of fraud, money laundering and other offences.

So in a sense, you could say that Yermak's brief sojourn behind bars was a symbolic reunion between a political mentee and his mentor. But it was hardly a pleasant one.

Firstly, as Ukrainska Pravda has heard several times from sources on Bankova Street [where the President's Office is located – ed.] and in law enforcement circles, the imprisoned oligarch often "sent his regards" to the now former head of the President's Office.

Secondly, the day before Yermak's arrival at the detention centre, Oleksandr Dubinskyi – a former MP from the president's Servant of the People party, who was expelled from the party and is awaiting a verdict in a treason case – was transferred from there to the Mena penal colony.

But according to Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (Mirror of the Week), before being moved to another prison, Dubinskyi managed to cause at least some trouble for Yermak and spoil his already uncomfortable stay in detention.

Several graffiti attributed to Dubinskyi allegedly appeared in the exercise yards, suggesting that Yermak might find himself being used for certain purposes by the other inmates.

This could have been the opening of a comedy sketch by Kvartal 95 (the TV production company Zelenskyy founded before he became president) – except that it's no joke, but a very real situation that unfolded, highly symbolically, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presidency.

To better understand the full drama of this political tragedy and help to prevent similar situations arising in the future, Ukrainska Pravda decided to reflect on three key aspects of Yermak's imprisonment: how he rose to power, how his arrest was allowed to happen, and most importantly, what will become of the system he helped to build.

Zelenskyy's favouritism

One of the defining features of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presidency has been his barely concealed, if not disdain, then certainly condescension towards institutions of representative democracy.

"Yes, somehow he never quite appreciated the idea of parliamentarism," a senior Servant of the People MP told Ukrainska Pravda with an ironic smile. "Whatever happens, the 'Boss' still doesn't like the Rada [Ukrainian Parliament], doesn't believe in its capabilities, and hopes he can resolve everything quickly on his own."

Essentially, the whole seven years of Zelenskyy's presidency has been marked by a struggle to reduce the number of political actors to one single monopolist.

From his very first weeks in office – even without his own parliamentary faction or people in government – Zelenskyy behaved as though he were, and would remain, the sole ruler of Ukraine.

After the Servant of the People party triumphed in the 2019 parliamentary elections, this tendency only intensified.

But instead of using the full extent of his power to swiftly build and reform a network of state institutions that could deliver his highly ambitious (and now largely forgotten) electoral programme, Zelenskyy came to believe in his own exceptionalism and the effectiveness of rapid, personalised decision-making.

The result was that power gradually shifted from representatives elected by the people to individuals personally selected by Zelenskyy in consultation with a close-knit circle on Bankova.

This, in turn, has led the country to a situation where it is governed not by those in whom power is vested, but by a group of "five or six managers", among whom the president's principal favourite stood out at every stage of governance.

A close look at Zelenskyy's political trajectory shows that Andrii Yermak has been the most obvious embodiment of this favouritism. But he hasn't been the only one, or even the first.

Zelenskyy has always been inclined towards a model of governance in which he himself is the unquestioned leader, followed by a second-in-command – a trusted confidant with near-unlimited authority to implement his will.

Before Zelenskyy got into politics, during the Kvartal 95 years, that "producer" role was played by Serhii Shefir. As numerous Ukrainska Pravda sources from Kvartal 95 have recounted, Shefir acted as both older brother figure and executive producer, ensuring that Zelenskyy could remain the star in their creative profession without being distracted by organisational details.

When Zelenskyy became president, Shefir moved to Bankova with him. But then the first major change of favourite happened – Andrii Bohdan appeared on the scene.

He was so important to Zelenskyy that the President's Administration was renamed the Office of the President so that Bohdan could be appointed as its head. [Bohdan should not have been eligible for the post under Ukraine's lustration laws because he had served in the administration of former prime minister Mykola Azarov, who fled to Russia in 2014 after the Revolution of Dignity – ed.]

And Bohdan repaid Zelenskyy in full. In 2019-2020, Ukrainska Pravda frequently observed that the country was effectively turning into a Presidential-Bohdan republic in which most issues were resolved via expletive-ridden phone calls by Bohdan, while the courts, government officials, the National Security and Defence Council, parliament and all the rest were driven into a rigid vertical under the sole leadership of the president.

But this came at a cost. Andrii Bohdan was never known for good manners or agreeableness. Abrupt, aggressive (albeit highly effective), embroiled in conflicts with other team members and even with Kolomoiskyi, Bohdan stood in stark contrast to the inconspicuous Yermak, who he said was "as comfortable as Italian shoes".

Yermak, a mere presidential aide, carved out a place for himself between Zelenskyy and Bohdan. And when Bohdan resigned in February 2020, Zelenskyy took it calmly. He already had a new favourite.

When he started in his new role, Yermak was an almost textbook facilitator between government officials, MPs, faction leaders and the President's Office: he tried to help everyone and generally be a peacemaker.

But he very quickly realised that in such a vertically-oriented system of power, you don't need to please everyone – only the person at the very top.

"If you want to understand how Yermak gained such influence, you need to realise that there was only one object in his life, one instrument he needed to learn to play – Zelenskyy. So Andrii devoted all his time to mastering that," explains one of his former associates.

Very soon, once he'd mastered this "science", Yermak, who was never vested with any formal powers, effectively became the central figure in all areas of policy – personnel, sanctions, the economy, and so on.

And he did so with such skill that Zelenskyy seemingly truly believed the claim he once made in an interview: "Yermak only does what I tell him."

At least, everything suited Zelenskyy just fine until the moment when Yermak's activities and those of other close associates began to pose a threat to Zelenskyy himself.

As soon as the Mindich tapes and Chernyshov's shady property deals began to surface, it became clear that Yermak's name would turn up at some point in those recordings – and maybe someone else's too…

Once representatives of the system had mentally filled in that blank, Yermak's days in power were numbered. Keeping him in office risked sinking the entire ruling team. To the political elite, this was obvious. But Yermak did not believe until the very last moment that his suzerain, his friend, was capable of dismissing him. Yet he did. And not for the first time.

The favourite in isolation

In November 2025, Andrii Yermak lost his unfettered influence for the first time. He was hardly the first person in Zelenskyy's orbit to fall from grace. In many cases, it was Yermak himself who had helped force earlier favourites out of the system and away from the president's inner circle.

Some of those sidelined figures – including Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a former deputy head of the President's Office, ex-prime minister Oleksii Honcharuk, former deputy prime minister Oleksandr Kubrakov, and former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba – were simply eased out and quietly forgotten once they lost their standing.

Others were hounded long after they had left. Andrii Bohdan was hit with personal sanctions on grounds that many considered unconvincing.

By those standards, the version of karma that Yermak suffered was mild.

After his resignation in November 2025, he vanished from public meetings, events, anything to do with Zelenskyy.

But that didn't mean Yermak vanished completely.

After an initial wobble, and the realisation that he had been rash in telling journalists he was "going to the front", he bounced back quickly.

He also began to build a clear strategy for survival, in two dimensions: a public one and one behind the scenes.

Publicly, Yermak chose an area that could help him retain his influence and, if necessary, provide a line of defence in any future legal proceedings.

He decided to go back to being a lawyer.

Soon after his resignation, Yermak renewed his licence and made a near-instant leap within the regulators of Ukraine's legal profession: he was appointed to chair a committee set up especially for him at the National Bar Association. The association is led by Lidiia Izovitova, who has long been linked to Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Russian politician and close associate of Vladimir Putin who was later charged with treason and deported to Russia in a prisoner swap in 2022.

"The association is a very insular community. Basically, you can't do anything there without paying court to Izovitova," one member told Ukrainska Pravda. "She keeps the number one position for herself, of course – but she decides who appears in the association's public channels, who occupies various positions and so on."

Yermak seems to have an instinctive rapport with Medvedchuk's friends and partners: his former business partner Artem Koliubaiev, a Ukrainian film producer and drone manufacturer, acquired a stake in a construction business associated with Medvedchuk and Vadym Stolar, a former MP from the banned pro-Russian Opposition Platform For Life party. Yermak's cooperation with Izovitova appears to be yet another example of this.

In fact, the survival strategy Yermak appears to be building is strikingly similar to Medvedchuk's own after the Orange Revolution, when he lost formal power but retained his influence.

Medvedchuk tightened his grip on the legal profession's regulators and became a gatekeeper for judicial appointments. He was able to cling onto influence right up until he was sent to Russia in exchange for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

"You don't need to sit on the High Council of Justice or the High Qualification Commission of Judges," one Ukrainska Pravda source in the legal community explained. "To control people, you need to be the person who appoints members of the High Council of Justice and the High Qualification Commission of Judges."

Yermak's behind-the-scenes survival strategy proved just as effective. He might have disappeared from Bankova physically, but he was still in the room, still shaping decision-making.

All his deputies stayed at Bankova. All his people in government were still in their posts. All the allies he had at other state agencies remained within the system too.

In effect, Yermak just moved a few streets away – from his office on Bankova to premises on nearby Olhynska Street, where Ukrainska Pravda recently documented meetings with him.

Even the appointment of Kyrylo Budanov as the new head of the President's Office did little to change that.

The so-called "revolutionary committee" that pushed Yermak out of his job had proved unable to remove him from the machinery of the state. For the former chief of staff, that weakness may have been reassuring. It suggested that Mindichgate – the corruption scandal that had briefly brought him down – might not touch him too severely after all.

It isn't clear what gave him that confidence – perhaps quiet assurances from the president about arrangements with law enforcement, or the "predictions" of Veronika Feng Shui, a fortune teller whom investigators say Yermak consulted on official appointments.

But when journalists unearthed a fresh batch of Mindichgate tapes and released transcripts of previously unheard conversations between the persons of interest in the case, it became clear that Yermak was utterly unprepared for the one challenge he should have been planning for since the day he resigned.

When investigators and prosecutors arrived to serve him with a notice of suspicion and asked the High Anti-Corruption Court to order his arrest, it emerged that in the almost six months since the searches, Yermak had made no preparations at all – not even lining up money for bail.

But an even more unpleasant shock may have been the way the president distanced himself. As the scandal unfolded, Zelenskyy did not once mention Yermak – the man who spent five years building the highly centralised system of rule the president still relies on.

Those inside the system who were willing to chip in for their former boss's bail were told not to by the President's Office to avoid Zelenskyy being dragged into the story.

In private, however, the president was far less detached. Ironically enough, Zelenskyy was issuing instructions to raise money for Yermak through the very network Yermak had built – a network that was already collapsing like a house of cards without him.

When the court set Yermak's bail at UAH 140 million (over US$3 million) on the morning of 14 May, it exposed an awkward fact: people who had been caught on tape discussing US$600 million deals were finding it close to impossible to come up with a mere US$3 million in "clean" money.

Sources have told Ukrainska Pravda that Zelenskyy tasked people like Servant of the People party leader Davyd Arakhamiia with raising the money. They knocked on every door. Appeals for support were even sent out to businesspeople whom Yermak had spent years leaning on through inspections, pressure from law enforcement and threats of sanctions.

By the evening of Friday 15 May, the Yermak-to-cash "exchange rate" was running at 1 to 3. Ukrainska Pravda has learned that some businesspeople were offered US$3 million in cash in return for US$1 million in "clean" contributions.

Why the machine jammed is unclear. Perhaps it was because the fundraising was being handled by the same "revolutionary committee" members who had helped bring Yermak down in the first place. Perhaps it was panic among the loyal but ill-suited appointees that Yermak had placed in senior roles across banks and the civil service.

Whatever the reason, even with orders being barked out by the boss of the whole country, the system could not – or would not – move any faster. That meant an extra two days behind bars for Yermak – plenty of time to reflect on how things had turned out.

***

"MPs are in shock – and that's putting it mildly," an influential Servant of the People party member told Ukrainska Pravda. "This case is so toxic that even they are afraid of being seen anywhere near it. It's already clear that this is the end of any influence Yermak had. It's just not realistic from now on."

Until the very end, Yermak was still able to cast himself as the victim of some vague campaign orchestrated from overseas – punished, he hinted, for his "intransigence" at the negotiating table. But after all the stories about fortune tellers and the rest, that pose collapsed into farce.

"After the court hearing, the fortune-teller stories, the pre-trial detention and all the humiliations, even people he did a great deal of harm to say the same thing: on a human level, they feel sorry for him," an influential source in the Ukrainian parliament said. "A leader cannot inspire pity."

The question is no longer whether the former head of the President's Office can cling on to his influence. Yermak's role within the system is clearly over. The real question is how this will change Zelenskyy, if it changes him at all. Will the president adapt, or will he simply find another favourite, as he has before?

He doesn't have that many options. Only three personalities in the government still appear to have independent political weight: Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of the Servant of the People faction in the Verkhovna Rada, Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, and Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the President's Office. Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko is also a contender, though her political base is still taking shape. That, in effect, is the president's bench.

For now, Zelenskyy's instinct seems to be to contain these figures' real or imagined ambitions rather than make any of them his new favourite. Yet he appears to have no other model.

He had a chance to take a different route last December, had he been willing or able to do so.

Ukrainska Pravda reported then that in the search for a new head for his Office, Zelenskyy approached Mykhailo Fedorov first. Fedorov arrived with an anti-crisis plan: a competitive selection process for the posts of prosecutor general and head of the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI), a complete overhaul of the leadership at the President's Office, major changes in government, and more.

Instead, the president opted for a stabilising influence by bringing Kyrylo Budanov, the former head of Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, into the President's Office. Budanov was meant to accelerate peace talks with the US and Russia and to pursue a rapid end to the war through diplomacy.

The choice signalled something else too: Zelenskyy's appetite for reform was waning.

But now that everyone from the luxury Dynasty housing complex has left the chat, what other choice does he have?

Roman Romaniuk, UP

Translated by Yelyzaveta Khodatska and Ganna Bryedova

Edited by Teresa Pearce