Not long ago he was regarded as virtually Ukraine’s co-president, said Jamie Dettmer on Politico. Now, less than six months after being forced to resign as President Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak finds himself in custody.
He was arrested last Thursday on suspicion of helping to launder $10.5 million (£7.7 million) via the construction of four luxury homes near Kyiv, some of the funds reportedly being part of the proceeds of a $100 million (£77 million) kickback scheme on contracts signed at Energoatom, the state’s atomic energy agency.
A man with outsize influence
Many of Zelenskyy’s allies have already been implicated in the wider case, including his former business partner Timur Mindich, who fled to Israel last year, and the former energy minister German Galushchenko, who was arrested in February while trying to flee the country. But Yermak’s arrest brings the matter to the very heart of the president’s inner circle, fuelling speculation about what Zelenskyy himself “may have known – or ought to have known”.
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Yermak’s arrest could prove disastrous for Zelenskyy, said Steve Gutterman on Radio Free Europe (Prague). In voters’ minds, there’s an “inseparable” link between the two men. They met in 2011 when both were working in television, and their close friendship and Yermak’s “outsize influence” as an unelected adviser mean that any stain on him could well “bleed over onto Zelenskyy”. The scandal also puts at risk Kyiv’s bid for fast-track EU membership, as one of Brussels’ key demands has been that Ukraine’s notorious corruption must be curbed.
Room for optimism
Zelenskyy has stayed “tight-lipped” since the Energoatom scandal broke in November, said Kateryna Denisova in The Kyiv Independent, but it may prove harder to downplay things this time round. He hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing himself, but ever since the name Vova (a diminutive for Volodymyr) popped up in a recently leaked audiotape conversation of two corruption suspects discussing a property development outside Kyiv, rumours about him have started to swirl.
Given the ongoing war with Russia, all these allegations feel particularly egregious, said Paul Niland in the Kyiv Post. However, there is room for optimism. The $10.5 million (£7.7 million) mentioned in the Yermak case is a “far cry” from the $10 billion (£7 billion) thought to have been stolen each year from 2010-14 under the former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Ukraine’s two anti-corruption agencies have been so determined to win the fight against graft that theft on that sort of scale is no longer possible. And there’s no clearer sign of that than the arrest of someone as powerful as Yermak.
