He talks as though his job is akin to rolling a boulder up a steep hill. There are stumbles and rollbacks, but progress is steadily made with Western partners and even with his lobbying of developing countries to wrestle some of them away from their traditional ties with Moscow. He’s clearly proud about getting China to attend last August’s Saudi-hosted peace talks.
“We have to explain 100 times what we need, but there’s no point just sitting here and complaining,” he said. He goes out of his way to emphasize Ukraine is grateful for all the support it is getting but, like Zelenskyy and his ministers, he presses the case for more — especially for more 155mm artillery shells, drones, electronic warfare systems and above all more Patriot air-defense systems.
“We still critically need additional air-defense systems because without them it is impossible to for us to defend our cities,” he added.
Yermak said more Patriot surface-to-air missiles are also required to defend the front lines, where the Russians are causing massive damage, and some fear tilting the military balance, with aerial guided bombs.
Yermak and Zelenskyy come from similar backgrounds — they’re the scions of middle-class families who highly valued education. Both trained as lawyers and both moved over to the entertainment industry.
Yermak founded a media company and produced movies, including a popular crime thriller The Line. They first became friends in 2011 when Zelenskyy became the general producer of a TV channel and he worked on Zelenskyy's 2019 Servant of the People election campaign, which ended with him pulling off an astonishing landslide win.
Asked whether he ever pinches himself because he could never have imagined himself helping to lead a country in such an era-defining struggle, Yermak looks a bit surprised at the question. But then says: “Honestly, sometimes I look at all of this and think this can’t be happening to me. I know this person, but sometimes I think it can’t be me. Look, I'm a normal person. I don't think that I'm such hero. But I can tell you the president has not changed. And neither have I,” he says, emphasizing the point by putting his hand to his chest.
He says when Zelenskyy and he first arrived at the presidential offices people working there were surprised when they would greet everyone with a cheery “good morning” or a “good evening” whatever their jobs or status. “It surprised them — it wasn’t like that with Zelenskyy’s predecessors,” he laughs.
“We are not standard politicians,” he says. “And we have not become so. It means we can still connect with our feelings and to understand what ordinary people feel,” he says.
Call-ups and corruption
Yermak refers several times to Zelenskyy as the “president of the people.” And because that’s how Zelenskyy sees himself he has not followed the counsel of some in the military — including Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, who was replaced earlier this year as the armed forces commander — to order a huge call-up. Zaluzhny said many as 500,000 additional soldiers are needed.
Yermak says Zelenskyy understands a huge new mobilization doesn’t have the backing of the people. “He's still president of the people. For him that’s very important and its very important that the people do something not just because they’re ordered to do it.”
He adds that Zaluzhny’s replacement, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, has conducted an audit and believes additional frontline troops can be secured by transfering desk-bound uniformed personnel to the frontlines. But it is a proposal some senior Ukrainian military officials are doubtful about and they argue Ukraine needs a major call-up.
Not everyone accepts Yermak’s claim that he and Zelenskyy have remained unchanged and the same as they were when they entered politics.
A former friend of the president, who until recently had a senior role in the government, told POLITICO both had changed. He spoke on the condition he not be named for this article so he could speak freely. “They’ve altered a lot and not for the better,” he said. He also complained that some people in the office of the president are not immune from Ukraine’s old disease of corruption and he questioned the use of unpaid advisers, whose roles are murky and that have no constitutional legitimacy.
“To understand this presidency you have to watch Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People series,” he said, referring to the comedy that catapulted Zelenskyy to stardom and features a schoolteacher who ends up as a surprise president, much like what happened to Zelenskyy.
“In the show, the president surrounds himself with a handful of trusted aides and short-circuits normal procedure and established ways of governing to get things done and that’s what Zelenskyy does now in reality,” he adds. “But there are risks with that approach,” he adds.
The role of unpaid advisers in the Ukrainian president’s office has also drawn the ire of anti-corruption campaigners, including Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder of the non-governmental organization the Anti-Corruption Action Center. “They are not public officials and are not being paid by the state and they didn’t have to submit asset declarations or go through special vetting and checks. So who they are? I have been very vocal about this,” she told POLITICO.
The role of Oleh Tatarov has drawn the biggest attention and accusations have swirled that he has the power to close down probes being conducted by the SBU security service with a phone call, says Kaleniuk. Tatarov is a Ukrainian lawyer who was dismissed from his job at the interior ministry after the Maidan revolution.