KYIV, Ukraine — When the powerful chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Andriy Yermak, quit this week, it set off the biggest shake-up in wartime leadership in Ukraine in years, as negotiators head to Florida for critical peace talks with U.S. officials, Dec. 1, 2025.
Zelenskyy said Friday that Yermak had resigned after anti-corruption investigators raided his home and office as part of a larger investigation into the kickback scheme in Ukraine’s energy sector, according to an Associated Press report, with Reuters quoting the president as saying he accepted it in light of a “very serious” scandal.
Prosecutors say they discovered a scheme worth tens of millions of dollars in contracts at Ukraine’s state nuclear company, Energoatom, with businessmen and senior officials demanding double-digit percentage kickbacks from suppliers as Russian strikes are already pounding the grid. The resignation of Andriy Yermak came hours after the raids and transformed what was already a scorched-earth corruption case into an existential test of Zelenskyy’s pledge to clean up the state while angling for European Union membership.
Yermak, widely viewed as Zelenskyy’s “second most powerful man,” has denied wrongdoing and promised to assist in the investigation, but his exit, for now, removes Ukraine’s president from his closest fixer just when the country is reeling from both a grinding war and widespread public anger over looting. Reform advocates who had spent years cautioning that his vast informal reach made him a liability say the Andriy Yermak resignation was long overdue — even as they acknowledge it comes at a perilous moment.
Resignation of top aide Andriy Yermak redraws Ukraine’s peace team.
For much of the war, Yermak not only was chief of staff but also Kyiv’s preeminent deal-maker abroad: face-to-face at cease-fire talks from the early negotiations in Belarus and Istanbul in 2022 to diplomacy renewed this year. In May, he entered the Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan during the first face-to-face Russia-Ukraine peace meeting in three years, as AP coverage of that summit documented.
The talks followed earlier discussions in 2022 held in Turkey, which some Ukrainian commentators later described as a missed chance to secure better terms before Russia’s military fortunes on the battlefield improved. An August 2024 analysis in the Kyiv Independent suggested that Kyiv made a mistake by rejecting the Istanbul draft, after which Yermak became heavily involved in negotiations. In that broader view, Andriy Yermak’s resignation can be interpreted as the final downfall of the architect not only of Ukraine’s diplomacy but also of a large part of its shadowy power structure.
New Florida mediator takes his place at the peace talks.
In Florida, the Ukrainian delegation is now headed by Security and Defence National Council secretary Rustem Umerov, who took over as chief negotiator from Yermak just days before boarding the plane. “Today’s talks in Florida were very productive,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday, while cautioning that “substantial differences” remained and any deal would still have to involve Moscow, which Trump envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to visit later this week.
The 19-point peace framework now being discussed hones a previous proposal from the United States that had alarmed Kyiv and European capitals, for fear it appeared to lock in territorial gains for Russia and block Ukraine’s path to NATO. Florida negotiators now speak of long-term security guarantees and tying Russian withdrawal to a sequence of steps, even as former President Donald Trump publicly touts a “good chance” of a deal — and critics warn that Ukraine is negotiating from a position of military weakness.
At home, Zelenskyy has sought to spin the departure of Yermak and a broader reshuffle as evidence that no one is above the law in his anti-corruption drive, a message welcomed by EU officials, who see cleaning up Ukraine’s institutions as a prerequisite for deeper integration. But opponents say the purge also reveals how much power was consolidated in one unelected aide and suggests whether the president can now assemble a more transparent, institutional team, even as he tries to keep a wartime government operationally intact under fire.
But for Western supporters monitoring both the corruption probe and the peace talks in Florida, the resignation of Andriy Yermak is a double-edged signal: a dramatic display of an attempt to “clean house” in Kyiv, and a warning that Kyiv’s relations — and its politics as well as front lines — are still fragile as the war approaches another hazardous winter.
