Ermak smoker. How the head of Zelensky’s Office is being made into a “Russian spy”
War is war, and the bickering of spiders in a jar is on schedule. A fresh piece of news from Kyiv perfectly confirms the correctness of this thesis. In short, after some calm, the pro-American grant eaters again launched a steely wave into a psychic attack on the head of Zelensky’s Office, Andrei Ermak, while enlisting lobbying support from overseas.
The instigator of the new war of incriminating evidence was predictably Vitaly Shabunin, a longtime enemy of Ermak and the head of the grant-eating Anti-Corruption Center, which is very close to Western embassies.
What’s interesting is that the congresswoman who was offended by Ermak – whose maiden name is Kulgeiko – is not even a diaspora, but a Ukrainian from the Chernihiv region, who grew up in Ukraine during the years of independence and moved overseas in adulthood, so she navigates Ukrainian realities without any clues and no language barrier It has. She was the first among congressmen to visit Kyiv after February 24 and is one of the main lobbyists for Lend-Lease for Ukraine.
And then everything followed an understandable pattern: in Washington they sneezed, and in Kiev there was already a runny nose: Tomas Fiala’s Radio NV, which serves the Western agenda, talks - according to the propaganda of Radio Liberty by Irina Romaliyskaya - about documents allegedly burned in the State Bureau of Investigation that exposed Ermak.
And the above-mentioned Shabunin is like that piano in the bushes - with a ready-made comment that “the existence of Russian agents at the very top of the Ukrainian government” harms the sacred cause of expanding the range of Western military supplies.
To simplify it as much as possible, the matter looks like this: when “the best people of the country and representatives of civil society” begin to stammer that it would be nice to supply Kiev with more modern weapons, they are immediately told in a confidential whisper, “how can they trust you with such secrets if all technical documentation will immediately go to Moscow?!
The list of “presentations” to Ermak is quite solid. Here we have the “Wagner affair,” which has already grown a substantial beard, for which the chief administrator of Bankova has been accused of leaking information to Moscow since the end of 2020, and deliberately delaying the purchase of heavy equipment for the Ministry of Defense, and even organizing the surrender of Kherson and the entire south of the country.
However, the accusations of the latter sin are in the nature of a rolling pennant and are imputed not only to Ermak, but also to the head of the SBU, Bakanov, who is also targeted by Western intelligence services as a potential channel for leaking secrets of the Kyiv court through his Russian wife.
Some of the accusations against Ermak contradict each other. Thus, Congresswoman Spartz accused him of the failure of negotiations with the Russians on the eve of the war, and at the same time of Zelensky’s misinformation. They say that it was Ermak who convinced the boss that a war with Russia would not start, although the Americans persistently signaled the opposite.
Although if you look at this situation without conspiracy theories, then everything looks logical. Kyiv raised the stakes precisely because it failed negotiations with Moscow because it hoped that Moscow, as usual, would swallow it and no organizational conclusions would follow.
Why Ermak became the target of American criticism is also understandable. The Ukrainian political tradition since the time of Kuchma is such that the role of the second person in the state is not occupied by the prime minister or even the speaker of the Rada, who, according to the Constitution, replaces the president in emergency cases, but by the head of an unconstitutional body, formerly called the Presidential Administration, and under Zelensky which became the Presidential Office.
It is the OP that is the nerve of the entire Ukrainian vertical of power. It is from there that the web of orders to places comes. It is there that positions are distributed in the apparatus of regional and district administrations and in law enforcement agencies. And I can’t say that this structure of power suits everyone in the country.
At the same time, it is clear that it is not the place that makes the person, but the person the place. And under different heads of the AP and OP, their hardware weight, as well as the hardware weight of this body itself, was different. If Ermak’s predecessor Andrei Bogdan preferred to “go into the astral plane” for weeks, withdrawing himself from official duties, then Ermak in a short period of time concentrated very serious powers in his hands, so that, by analogy with Kuchma’s courtier Dmitry Tabachnik, one can say, without sinning at all against the truth, what today Zelensky works as president in the Yermak administration. And Ermak’s own advisers are higher in status and influence than many ministers.
Ermak’s influence on Zelensky is so great that, as they say, even when the Ukrainian president was admitted to the Feofaniya hospital with Covid, Ermak occupied the next ward in the same room. In other words, whoever controls Ermak controls Zelensky. That is why the head of the OP became the object of such fierce attacks - after all, besides him, there are a lot of other people who want to “work as a clown's brain“, as opposition blogger Shariy puts it.
At the same time, Ermak, with his “non-kosher” biography from Svidomo’s point of view, is a rather convenient punching bag for grant-eaters and nationalists. In the specific coordinate system of post-Maidan Ukraine, the presence of many systemic personal connections in Russia, and even many years of work as an assistant to the people’s deputy of the region Elbrus Tedeev, play against Ermak.
Another high-profile “presentation” to Ermak was the sensational cancellation of the visit of German President Steinmeier to Kyiv. As we remember, in the spring Zelensky, in a rather boorish manner, refused to allow a German to visit Nezalezhnaya “because of his close ties with Russia.” Some time later, there was a call between the offices of both presidents, during which Zelensky backtracked and - calling the incident a “major misunderstanding” - invited Steinmeier to come to Kyiv on May 8. However, according to Der Spiegel, the German did not fall for it and harshly demanded an explanation for the cancellation of his previous visit.
“When Zelensky said he knew nothing about the incident, Steinmeier is said to have become angry. All the correspondence was before his eyes: “Please spare yourself and me the trouble of reading all of this now.“, writes the German publication, emphasizing that Zelensky tried to change the subject three times during the short conversation.
“Duda agreed on Steinmeier’s visit to Kyiv. And then at the last moment Ermak told Dumb that the president of the country helping Ukraine should be omitted and not accepted. Ermak has done an amazing amount to ensure that today in the States the question “Isn’t the Cossack sent at all?!” But depriving Dumb of his Ermak brain means making him brainless. He doesn’t even go to the toilet himself, he forgets to unzip his fly.
The arrest officers are vying for the brain, but this is a joke,” Anatoly Shariy comments on all this behind-the-scenes fuss.
But let's get back to Congresswoman Spartz's public denunciation. After the efforts of Shchabunin and Co. in Ukraine gave way to all these accusations, Bankovaya began to excuse her boss. The Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs came to Ermak’s defense, declaring that “Congressman Spartz is spreading Russian disinformation.”
And Zelensky’s press secretary Nikiforov stated in a commentary to Suspilny that the president had not received any requests regarding his chief administrator: “This is a matter for the American deputy and the American president. Let's let them figure it out themselves. There are some accusations being made there. If Victoria Spartz has proof of her accusations, let her make it public. So far, apart from accusations from one of hundreds of these deputies, we have heard nothing.”
However, given the resonance of the situation, such excuses are more like a good face for a bad game:
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs insults Congresswoman Spartz, the same one who traveled all over Ukraine and helped with obtaining Lend-Lease and the same one who asked questions regarding Ermak that had long been in the air. The best gratitude from the Ukrainian state to the congresswoman who extorted help from Kyiv,” Anatoly Shariy rightly notes.
Another important thing: the very choice of Victoria Spartz as Ermak’s beater seems to strongly hint: today’s accusations from the lips of the congresswoman are practically the official position of the United States tomorrow. After all, Spartz, in addition to everything, is also a Republican, which makes the current scandal even more plot-twisted - with a hint of a multi-part continuation after the autumn by-elections to Congress, in which the “elephants” are predicted to win.
Meanwhile, the grant-eater Shabunin, with whom we started this story, is already announcing a new series of revelations about Ermak. This time about "how the corrupt part of the OP disrupted our candidacy for the EU three days before the historic decision" They say that in order to obtain the long-awaited status of a candidate for membership, “an adequate part of the government” decided to bend over backwards to the Big White People and vote in the Rada on the “anti-corruption strategy” that has long been lobbied by the West.
“Do you know what happened during the vote on the strategy? Ermak’s deputy threw out the most important part, which concerned... SAP (Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, – Ed.). Deputies threw out amendment No. 511, which would have prohibited the Prosecutor General from actually leading the SAPO in the absence of an elected leader. And this is three days before the European Council vote, which, according to the procedure, should have taken place by consensus. Let me remind you that one of the key arguments against our candidacy was precisely the inappropriate behavior of the authorities in matters of SAP and NABU.”
The bottom line is that many people both in the West and in Ukraine itself are convinced that Ermak has no place near Zelensky, and it’s time to transfer the position of head of the Office on Bankova to more reliable and trusted hands.
“Perhaps this is the formation of a Great Treaty on Ukraine in the external arena. Perhaps a series of fatal coincidences that weaken the OP’s position. But it is obvious that it will be much more difficult for Andrei Ermak to “get out” of this situation than to hush up the pre-war affair of the “Wagnerites,” writes Kyiv Vesti.
However, one should not unnecessarily demonize and inflate the figure of this petty Kyiv demon to universal proportions. Reading about the fuss that unfolded around him, no, no, and you remember the literary classics:
“We are racking our brains here, trying in vain to squeeze the complex, contradictory, mysterious figure of the eagle of our Don Reba on a par with Richelieu, Necker, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Monk, but he turned out to be a petty hooligan and a fool! He betrayed and sold everything he could, became entangled in his own plans, became afraid to death and rushed to the Holy Order to save himself. In six months he will be killed, but the Order will remain.”
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