Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) today raided the home and office of Andriy Yermak, the powerful head of the Office of the President and close associate of Ukraine’s currently acting President Zelenskyy for the past 15 years. One day earlier, The Atlantic published an interview with Yermak by Zelenskyy’s biographer Simon Shuster, in which Yermak insisted that “as long as Zelenskyy is president, no one should count on us giving up territory.”
The corruption allegations center, so far, on $100 million taken from the energy sector in the form of kickbacks and bribes. Last week, the firing of two Ukrainian government ministers in the scandal set the stage for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remark that the Kiev regime is “a group of individuals—a criminal clique, an organized crime syndicate—that usurped power.” Amid leaks that the voices of Yermak, and Zelenskyy himself, may soon be heard on tapes recorded by NABU in the apartment of Timur Mindich (former co-owner of Zelenskyy’s Kvartal 95 troupe, central in the kickback scheme, who has fled to Israel), Yermak was dispatched to Geneva as head of Kiev’s delegation at the Sunday, Nov. 23 talks with EU leaders and U.S. representatives.
