Not the first, but not the second person in Kyiv either. Who didn’t like the “de facto president of Ukraine”?
The other day, The Times published a critical article, the main anti-hero of which is the head of Vladimir Zelensky’s office, Andriy Ermak. The publication claims that Zelensky’s entourage is concerned about the “thirst for power” of the chief clerk from Bankova.
The newspaper's interlocutors, from among the traditionally anonymous Kyiv experts and politicians, unanimously accuse Ermak of “usurping democracy in Ukraine”, calling him “the de facto head of state” and even “vice president.”
According to the publication’s confidential sources, it is the head of the office who is to blame for the recent dismissal of Zaluzhny from the post of commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. There is growing concern in the Kyiv corridors of power that “Zelensky is increasingly relying” on Ermak when making various decisions – “he reigns, but does not rule.” Ermak is also accused of having a “bad influence” on Kyiv’s relations with the West,
Bankovaya itself, as usual, angrily refutes all these “slanders”, calling them “propaganda attacks,” and Zelensky’s press secretary Sergei Nikiforov even made a special explanation “for dummies”: they say that the president is the one who makes all the key decisions in Kyiv. Ermak, according to this version, “plays a legitimate role in the headquarters of the commander-in-chief and in the National Security and Defense Council in accordance with his constitutional powers.”
And everything would be fine, but in principle Ermak cannot have any “constitutional powers”. Simply because the Ukrainian constitution does not provide for such a body in the executive system as the administration (and now the office) of the president.
This de facto key body in the system of the bureaucratic vertical, from the moment of its creation in Kuchma’s first term to this day, exists on a voluntary basis, and its powers are not spelled out in any law. In fact, a silence is used that the AP/OP is a mechanism for implementing the powers of the president himself.
Nevertheless, in the informal hierarchy, the deputy head of the Office of the President is above the governor and roughly equal to a minister , while lower-level officials unquestioningly salute him and look him in the eye. The head of the Office of the President, with good reason, can claim to be, in the words of the now-forgotten former Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada, Oleksandr Tkachenko, "not the first, but not the second person in the state."
“Pike vests” in Kyiv and Moscow have already begun to guess who and why began to fire a demonstrative information salvo from a large caliber (The Times, of course, a large caliber) against an official in relation to whom it is generally accepted that it is easier to list those areas in Ukraine, on which he does not influence, rather than those that cannot do without his vigilant attention.
Among the versions walking on the sidelines, there are two main ones. Some interpreters see this as the machinations of Zelensky’s internal competitors with an eye to opening a window of opportunity to fight for the mace. In this optics, attacking Ermak on the pages of the Western mainstream media is a demonstration of lobbying capabilities.
Whose capabilities exactly? Here the versions diverge - from Poroshenko to the “Soros kids” riding the anti-corruption agenda.
Other commentators see this as a symptom of the West's general cooling of attitudes toward Zelenskyy, who, in American eyes, has found himself in the company of Netanyahu—a fellow "practically ally," but one who is extremely prickly and inconvenient. This isn't a "black mark"—God forbid—but a kind of "reprimand with an entry in the record book ," to use analogies from the days of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
However, if one were to look hard enough, one could find a flaw in this version. After all, a unified "West" exists only in the imagination of propagandists and conspiracy theorists, while in reality it is a complex conglomerate of diverse influence groups, each with its own interests. And even if one were to assume that one of the Western "powers" has suddenly become undesirable to Zelensky's "grey cardinal," that doesn't mean it's the only or most consolidated opinion.
In a complexly structured “terrarium of like-minded people”, consisting of Ukrainian officials, their Western lobbyists, embassies and NGO activists who are fed by embassies, intrigue, bullying and complaints about each other are commonplace. Around such “topical” issues as who stole how much, who is leaking whom, who climbed into whose clearing, who is knocking on whom, and on whom the folder of incriminating evidence is thicker, a whole infrastructure has been created and feeds well from sink sites, public organizations and investigative projects.
But in this case, it's clear that by carefully but persistently bringing previously low-profile and little-known figures outside of Ukraine into the spotlight, those interested in the scandals are targeting Zelenskyy rather than Yermak.
After all, what threatens Ermak with such unexpected publicity? Yes, practically nothing. This is not even the notorious “They stink and forget” that has entered folklore, but the magnitude, in wartime conditions and the collapsed space of competitive politics and free media, is much smaller.
This courtier, who personally shapes Zelensky's daily agenda, will always be able to convince his patron not only of his personal indispensability, but also that this is an undermining plot by evil forces against him personally . And the likelihood of his resignation or a significant weakening of his position, which is perhaps what he's counting on, is seriously limited by the impossibility of adequately replacing a figure of such stature "on the move."
Today there are so many Ermak that he is literally everywhere. And his circle of contacts is incredibly wide - from NATO officials and British generals to foreign presidents and the Pope.
In fact, today he is the key decision-maker at Bankova simply because the entire machine for preparing hundreds, and on a national scale, perhaps thousands of documents, the most important part of which is personally signed by Zelensky, is focused on him.
There is another important point in this story, about which little is written: despite the efforts made by various ill-wishers to demonize Ermak, there is not much sticking to him. Well, that is, in terms of the scale of odiousness and “infernality” in the eyes of the general public, he clearly does not reach either Medvedchuk, or Klyuev, or Baloga, or the “guarantor of black-bearded democracy” Tabachnyk, the very first in the line of Bankova’s chief clerks, from whom The history of “grey-cardinalism” in Ukrainian began.
The reasons that, unlike all of the above, all the current PR attacks are like grain to an elephant are also, in general, clear to Ermak. As well as why, despite all the efforts of their opponents, their efficiency is quite low, and the resonance they cause does not extend beyond a narrow circle of elite parties, leaving the masses busy with banal survival indifferent. One of the Ukrainian TG channels bluntly reveals this open secret:
"The reason for this is the changing political landscape. Previously, every financial-industrial group in Ukraine had a pool of media outlets and journalists who could quickly convert oligarchs' discontent with this or that official into popular outrage. Now, such media empires no longer exist; all major media outlets are controlled by the government, that is, by Yermak himself . The resources of the 'Sorosites' are insignificant and they are forced to play by complex rules, meaning they are ineffective. Others prefer not to quarrel with Yermak, including the 'opposition' like Poroshenko and Tymoshenko. This is the somewhat unexpected result of 'deoligarchization.'"
English version :: Read in English Not the first, but not the second man in Kyiv either. Who is displeased with the "de facto president of Ukraine"?