Budanov, Arakhamiia or Fedorov: who could become Zelenskyy's new pillar of support?

On 26 May, Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's fifth president and leader of the European Solidarity Party, returned to the third floor of the president's office on Bankova Street for the first time in years. His meeting with the current head of state, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was late starting. He had to wait nearly an hour. All the leaders of the other parliamentary factions had already had their audiences with the president.

It was the first time the two politicians had met since Russia launched its full-scale invasion – and their first face-to-face meeting in Zelenskyy's seven years in office.

"We realised they had deliberately left us until the very end so they could speak to all the other factions first," said one person from Poroshenko's circle. "It was obvious that they spent the whole hour preparing for the conversation with us."

The preparations had begun days earlier. Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of Servant of the People, Zelenskyy's faction in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), and Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the President's Office, had reportedly talked to Poroshenko in advance and tried to establish a framework for the conversation. Up until the last moment, it was still unclear whether the meeting would happen at all.

Poroshenko had come prepared. But the approach he chose to take unsettled both Arakhamiia and Budanov, and almost tipped Zelenskyy into an emotional outburst.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, Poroshenko came to the President's Office armed with printouts of various memes and other materials from social media and launched into a rant, complaining that Zelenskyy and his circle were systematically discrediting him.

"For a few seconds, everyone on our side was speechless," one eyewitness from the government team said.

Words in response came quickly: within moments, the conversation had switched to raised voices and the only form of the enemy's cultural presence that can't be replaced – Russian swearwords.

Zelenskyy was outraged that Poroshenko was trying to cast himself as a victim when in his view, the fifth president's 'Porokhobots' (Poroshenko supporters) behave just as aggressively online and cost "millions of dollars". At the very least, Zelenskyy believed Poroshenko had no moral right to reproach him over something like that.

Zelenskyy, in turn, raised concerns about Poroshenko's support for potential rivals to the current government, above all Ukraine's ambassador to London and former commander-in-chief, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

At that point, Poroshenko had to choose his words carefully. He responded that if the entire machinery of the state and all available government resources were being used against him, then there was nothing surprising about him seeking help from anyone capable of challenging the current authorities.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources said that despite its rocky start, the meeting gradually became somewhat constructive. At certain points, the sources said, it resembled a conversation between people who might be able to get over their mutual dislike and try to do something together for their country.

Poroshenko did not even directly raise the issue of the sanctions imposed on him, although he did mention that they are hindering his work.

"The position was simple: if we agree now on some model of cooperation, then the sanctions issue will eventually fall away by itself," a source from Poroshenko's team said. "If there is no agreement, then no requests will make any sense at all."

After the meeting ended, Poroshenko was left with a strange feeling of emptiness. Ukrainska Pravda's sources from the teams of Yuliia Tymoshenko and Dmytro Razumkov (leader of Smart Politics, an inter-factional association) said the same.

"No one agreed on anything. No one asked for anything, not even what we were ready to offer. There were no concrete decisions or proposals," a lawmaker from Razumkov's group told Ukrainska Pravda.

Zelenskyy's team explained that this approach – to ask for nothing and promise nothing – had been a deliberate decision.

As one member of Zelenskyy's team put it, "this first meeting was needed for something else entirely. We could not offer anything because we had different considerations."

To get a sense of how the President's Office is thinking now, it helps to look at three things: who persuaded Zelenskyy to reopen talks with the opposition and why; who was sitting beside him in those meetings; and, more broadly, who the president can still rely on inside government to keep the political system stable now that the "Yermak era" is over.

Ukrainska Pravda set out to find out exactly that.

The corridors of power: Bankova in search of allies

"If the first meeting had started off with bargaining over positions or votes, it would have looked like a crude 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'-type deal," a senior government source told Ukrainska Pravda. "So the point of the first meeting was simply to make a second one possible – and then more after that."

Zelenskyy had been sceptical at first. But speaking to allies the next day, he conceded the format could be useful over time.

At the very least, it signals to the political class as a whole that there may be changes in the way political and personnel decisions are made. It's the first time in seven years that the door to Bankova's corridors of power has been opened to representatives of other political camps.

"At one point the conversation at Bankova turned to appointments," a source from Zelenskyy's team told Ukrainska Pravda. "Someone asked Ze: why this fixation on only appointing people we nominated ourselves or people put forward by Servant of the People? Why are we so sure they're 'our people'? We don't really know them. We've never had any real working relationship with most of the Cabinet of Ministers [the Ukrainian government]. So why are they suddenly 'our people'?"

The same person then named the few exceptions to this. "Who did the president personally nominate? Yuliia Svyrydenko. Maybe Fedorov too.

And if that's how it is," the source went on, "why assume other factions would offer worse candidates than our own? On the contrary, if the Verkhovna Rada is trying to get rid of these ministers for the hundredth time, at least let them be ministers proposed by someone like Yuliia Tymoshenko – then we'd have someone to hold accountable. But as things stand, who can we hold accountable if these are supposedly 'our people'? There isn't even anyone to shout at."

That unannounced internal shift – the sense that some cautious cooperation with other political groupings is becoming inevitable as a governance crisis deepens – helps explain why Budanov and Arakhamiia pushed the idea of Zelenskyy talking with different factions.

As other political players start weighing up the prospects of moving from Bankova's corridors of power into its offices, Zelenskyy is buying himself time to solve another knotty problem: finding people for his new team of "five or six managers".

The need for them is clear. Post-Yermak, the president is facing an uncomfortable truth. What once looked like a monolithic single-party majority and a united team linking the President's Office and the Cabinet of Ministers is now a demoralised, fragmented collection of individuals prone to squabbles, intrigue and infighting.

They still call themselves a team on paper. But unless they change the principle governing their existence – the constant search for enemies – the system will keep on eating itself.

Whether that can be done is an open question. But Zelenskyy has at least been persuaded to try.

The argument has been made most forcefully by the two men who sit beside him at every meeting: Kyrylo Budanov and Davyd Arakhamiia. Despite their personal friendship, to Zelenskyy they represent two totally different currents inside the government – the "safe insiders" and the "insider-rivals".

The "safe insiders": Arakhamiia, Svyrydenko, Umierov, Tatarov and others

The dividing line between the "safe insiders" and "insider rivals" in Zelenskyy's team is fairly straightforward – whether they have political ambitions (and the approval ratings to back them) or not.

Kyrylo Budanov and Mykhailo Fedorov, for example, are both well-known and enjoy a measure of public trust, though to different degrees. Budanov has made no secret of the fact that he would like to have a shot if elections are held. Fedorov keeps any such ambitions out of sight, but many at Bankova are convinced he has them too.

Davyd Arakhamiia is different. He gained a lot more clout after Andrii Yermak's four days in pre-trial detention, yet he has never had strong personal ratings and it is unlikely that he ever will. That remains true regardless of how central he is to the day-to-day running of parliament, managing communication between the President's Office, Cabinet of Ministers and Verkhovna Rada, or taking part in peace talks with the US and Russia.

For whatever reason, public trust in the Servant of the People faction leader is limited. Arakhamiia does not appear especially bothered by that, because he seems not to cherish any political ambitions of his own.

That makes him "safe" and, for now, indispensable to Zelenskyy and the government in general. Those at the top have come to accept that Davyd plays his own game, but that it usually runs alongside Zelenskyy's interests rather than against them.

Several other personalities around the president occupy a similar space. Foremost among them is Rustem Umierov, Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council (NSDC), who appears to have retained Zelenskyy's trust despite featuring in the "Mindich tapes" released by the anti-corruption agencies as part of the Operation Midas investigation into corruption in Ukraine's energy sector. Umierov continues to oversee the peace talks and agreements with Gulf states and other countries on Drone Deals and related issues.

Denys Shmyhal beavers away quietly, staying in lockstep with the President's Office. He has held so many posts over the years that it's easy to lose track of which one he occupies now. Shmyhal has cast himself as the president's "hands" – someone who can be sent wherever he is needed. Politically, he barely registers, and that's a conscious choice.

Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko holds the highest office in the executive branch, but she seems uninterested in becoming an independent political player. Her focus is the economy: drafting development strategies and finding the money for the next round of "Zelenskyy's thousands" – the president's one-off cash handouts that the government then has to fund and administer. As far as possible, she stays out of political infighting.

"Yuliia has one objective: to avoid any scandal," a senior figure in Zelenskyy's team said of the prime minister's ambitions. "She certainly isn't involved in corruption; she won't be caught with dirty money, because she doesn't have any. If she wants to leave politics later and give lectures and sit on boards, she just needs to serve out her term cleanly. And that's exactly the path she is taking."

Someone else who poses little political threat to the president is Oleh Tatarov, a deputy head of the President's Office – a controversial official whom civil society groups have been trying, unsuccessfully, to push out for years.

In recent months, Yermak had been working systematically to gradually neutralise Tatarov's influence over the law enforcement system – and it paid off. Zelenskyy's deputy for security affairs has indeed lost a significant share of his leverage.

"The SSU has long been out of Oleh's hands," a senior member of Team Zelenskyy told Ukrainska Pravda. "Yermak let him down in the case with the Prosecutor General's Office and pushed [Ruslan] Kravchenko through. Tatarov still has influence over the Investigation Bureau and certain individuals in the Interior Ministry. But the overall trajectory is difficult for Tatarov."

Moreover, even after Yermak's resignation, Tatarov's troubles were far from over.

One recent example is the exposure of some police officers who were alleged to have taken bribes for covering up illegal pornography studios. The regional Interior Ministry chiefs who came under fire from the SSU and the Prosecutor General's Office are those commonly associated with Tatarov in government circles.

Sources from the President's Office told Ukrainska Pravda that Tatarov himself saw the case as a message from Andrii Yermak – that the former chief is using people inside the law enforcement system who are still loyal to him to erode his ex-deputy's influence.

Other members of the government team, however, offer a simpler explanation: Prosecutor General Kravchenko's desire to remind the president of his own effectiveness.

Either way, Tatarov today is looking less and less like his 2021-2022 self.

The result is that a kind of "inner circle" of loyalists has solidified around Zelenskyy – one intended to collectively replace the loss of Yermak as a single dominant figure. Of that group, Arakhamiia alone appears capable of the bold, unpredictable moves that could meaningfully reshape the system.

He increasingly resembles a classic playmaker in a football team: someone with no ambition to be the star, yet without whom the system cannot function.

But the same sword of Damocles that hung over the previous generation of "five or six managers" – the prospect of trouble with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) – hangs over him too.

During the so-called "wages in envelopes" investigation, anti-corruption officers searched not only the homes of MPs, but also Arakhamiia's aide's and his office in the party headquarters. Those searches have so far yielded no results, but the fact that they took place at all sent a signal.

It is therefore unlikely that the Servant of the People leader will ever become the public face of a major political project. The role of grey eminence, however, appears set to remain his for the foreseeable future.

The "insider rivals"

Sociologists who track changes in approval ratings and are in regular contact with Ukrainska Pravda assert that Zelenskyy managed to weather the first wave of negative sentiment following Mindichgate in large part because he surrounded himself with figures who command strong public support.

Chief among them are Kyrylo Budanov and Mykhailo Fedorov.

"People saw those appointments and placed their trust not so much in the president as in the figures they already trusted. There was an expectation that those figures would be able to change the situation within the government and influence Zelenskyy himself," one sociologist explains.

Yet a closer look at the internal situation reveals something considerably more complex.

When Budanov first joined the President's Office, he genuinely believed in a swift diplomatic process to end the war. He approached his new role more as if it was a start-up expected to deliver fast results than a long-term investment project measured in years.

In conversations with team members, he didn't hide the fact that he was aware of his own approval ratings and had a clear understanding of his prospects in any future elections – and not just parliamentary ones.

Polling data tracked regularly by leading research centres and reviewed by Ukrainska Pravda shows two significant trends over recent months.

The first is a gradual but consistent decline in Zaluzhnyi's approval ratings. The second is an equally steady rise in Budanov's.

Were a presidential run-off to be modelled today, both Zaluzhnyi and Budanov would defeat Zelenskyy. But while not so long ago the gap between the two generals was vast, it has since narrowed rapidly – from double digits to a single figure.

So any excessive political activity on Budanov's part inevitably unsettles the president. Zelenskyy reads it as potential groundwork for a future political project.

Notably, until recently the relationship between the president and his chief of staff was largely formal – one or two briefings a day, after which each returned to his own office.

In recent weeks, however, that has changed. Budanov appears to have convinced Zelenskyy that if they are to work together, they ought to do so in earnest.

The creation of the National Pantheon is one example of this new approach. The president did not support the idea at first, but later he agreed to personally lead the project and make it part of his own agenda.

A similar dynamic played out with the meeting of governors and parliamentary committee chairs. Zelenskyy initially blocked Budanov from convening it, then the following week he chaired and opened the gathering himself.

The tension has not gone away. But Zelenskyy appears to have grasped the simple fact that without a properly functioning President's Office, governing the country effectively will be difficult.

So partly for this reason, at meetings with parliamentary factions and regional elites, Budanov is increasingly being positioned as the person responsible for domestic policy, relations with regional governors and engagement with parliament.

This may also be because the prospects of a swift diplomatic settlement to the war are receding, and so, too, are the prospects of holding elections.

Budanov's involvement in arranging Zelenskyy's meetings with faction leaders – and his personal presence throughout all five-plus hours of those sessions – is a significant indicator that the president and the chief of staff have found a workable model of collaboration.

The dynamic between Zelenskyy and Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov is developing along rather different lines.

During his time at the Ministry of Digital Transformation, Fedorov was one of the president's closest favourites – the source of much of the positive news the government could point to. That reservoir of trust carried over into his move to the Defence Ministry, but in recent weeks a noticeable chill has descended on the relationship between the supreme commander-in-chief and his defence minister.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, there are several reasons for this.

The first is tied to the events surrounding Mindichgate and the notice of suspicion served on Andrii Yermak. There's a widespread belief in political circles that last autumn, Fedorov attempted to act as an intermediary between the government and the anti-corruption bodies, and for a time those close to the president believed Fedorov could guarantee that certain things would not happen – such as Yermak being served with a notice of suspicion. When that happened anyway, the president began directing grievances towards Fedorov.

But even within Zelenskyy's own circle, people realise that those grievances are, to put it mildly, overstated.

"Misha couldn't have guaranteed anything. The way NABU operates, even its leadership sometimes has no advance knowledge of forthcoming investigative actions. Investigators are fairly autonomous and often simply present everyone with a fait accompli. What exactly could Fedorov have guaranteed? It is a little naive," a source told Ukrainska Pravda.

The second reason for the tension between Zelenskyy and Fedorov is the minister's own political views.

In December, at the height of Mindichgate, Fedorov presented his vision for reforming the government and the President's Office. It was the contents of that proposal that cost him the chief of staff position – his plan was seen as too radical and too "Soros-style".

"Misha brought together in a single document everything we had spent years pushing back against," a source close to the president's inner circle told Ukrainska Pravda. "Open competitive selection procedures for the State Bureau of Investigation and the Prosecutor General's Office, the dismissal of the entire President's Office, a government reset and so on. So they sent him to the Defence Ministry. Especially since he was the only one who had his own vision for the war. Nobody else had one."

Fedorov's team are still firmly convinced that had his ideas been implemented at the time, the crises now unfolding in the wake of the latest batch of Mindich tapes would not have posed a serious problem for the government.

The president's circle, however, reacted rather differently to his proposals.

"It looked as if Misha wanted to take charge and run everything – without elections, purely on the back of our fear," said a source within the president's team.

Fedorov came under increasingly close scrutiny, with suspicions multiplying around him. One question that Zelenskyy's team started to ask was why, after moving to the Defence Ministry, he did not disband the team of political strategists and communications experts who had previously worked on relaunching Servant of the People and running Zelenskyy's campaign.

Fedorov's explanation was straightforward: running the Defence Ministry during wartime – handling mobilisation, enlistment offices, and army reform – would be impossible without robust communications support.

But the doubts linger on. The president periodically raises the question of whether Fedorov is attempting to build his own political project.

A further source of tension complicates the picture. Fedorov is currently preparing one of the most significant reforms of the Ukrainian armed forces since the war began – overhauling the command structure, procurement and personnel appointments, and potentially reshuffling the military leadership.

It all looks promising in the presentations and strategic documents. But Zelenskyy understands perfectly well that in practice, such a reform could generate enormous conflict within the system.

That, too, is part of the reason why he has been keeping a degree of distance from the defence minister of late – so that in the event of failure, he will have the option of not absorbing the fallout himself.

***

Despite all these contradictions, Budanov, Fedorov and Arakhamiia remain among the few people in government who are capable of trying to convert their approval ratings, resources and influence into tangible change rather than just going with the flow.

They understand one thing clearly: whatever the internal conflicts and mutual suspicions, they are still part of the same political team.

According to Ukrainska Pravda's sources, in recent weeks Arakhamiia has been persistently pushing the idea of a major "strategic session" on the government's top leadership.

The idea is simple: bring together the five or six people who actually make decisions in the country and ask them honestly where they see themselves in a year or two.

"Not to produce a presentation," explains one person who has already been approached by Arakhamiia about the idea. "But so that we understand whether we can still function as a team. Perhaps some people don't see themselves alongside the others – that's fine. But it's better to say so openly right now than to pretend nothing is happening.

Though preferably not at Mindich's apartment," the potential strategic session participant jokes.

Roman Romaniuk, Ukrainska Pravda

Translated by Anna Briedova, Anastasiia Yankina

Edited by Teresa Pearce