By Ian Lovett, Robbie Gramer and Laurence Norman

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's top aide, Andriy Yermak, was in Geneva Sunday negotiating a peace plan. On Friday, Ukraine's anticorruption agency searched his home, prompting renewed demands from lawmakers to remove him.

Zelensky is under growing pressure over his most trusted adviser at a delicate moment, as he tries to keep the U.S. as an ally. Yermak, who handles Zelensky's most vital diplomatic tasks, is taking heat over a major scandal. Two cabinet ministers have already been removed from their posts this month, following allegations of a $100 million corruption scheme at the state nuclear energy company.

If Zelensky were to dismiss Yermak, he would lose his foremost emissary to the U.S. since the start of the war. Keeping him could further enrage opponents and even members of his own party in Parliament, known as the Rada.

The National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine announced Friday on social media that it had carried out searches of places linked to Yermak as part of an investigation and that more details would be released later. The agency didn't say what the investigation was concerning.

Anticorruption authorities have been investigating allegations that Ukrainian officials pressured companies to pay kickbacks for contracts with the state nuclear-energy company, Energoatom. Neither Yermak nor Zelensky have been accused of wrongdoing.

Aides to Zelensky and Yermak didn't respond to requests for comment. Yermak confirmed on social media that his home had been searched and said he was cooperating with investigators.

Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, former executive director of Transparency International Ukraine, an anticorruption group, and now a lawmaker from an opposition party in the Rada, insisted that Yermak either knew about the alleged corruption scheme, or should have known about it.

"Zelensky must change the head of his office -- and the sooner it happens, the less damage it will cause," Yurchyshyn said. "I understand that, personally, it's very hard for him to make that decision."

Up to now, Zelensky has stuck by Yermak. At a meeting with members of his ruling party in the Rada last week, he said that staffing decisions in his office are up to him, according to one member who was present. In the following days, he sent Yermak to Geneva to meet U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reaffirming his key role in the administration.

Yermak and Zelensky met in the early 2010s, when they were both in show business. Zelensky, a comedian and TV actor, was the top producer at a Ukrainian TV channel. Yermak was an entertainment lawyer who worked for the country's first registered law firm.

They struck up a friendship, and when Zelensky won the presidency in 2019, he appointed Yermak as a senior adviser and promoted him to chief of staff in February 2020. He usually stands beside Zelensky in photos, towering over the president and often sporting the same dark green military-esque clothing.

Many Western officials view Yermak with a grudging respect. They say he is relentlessly hardworking and that he speaks in sync with Zelensky. But they also say he can be difficult -- stubborn, prone to drone on in half-hour monologues, and at times naive about geopolitics.

"I think people respect Yermak because they know he is powerful, and they know he has Zelensky's ear," said Kurt Volker, who served as Trump's envoy for Ukraine during his first term. "They don't necessarily like him, because he can be difficult to work with and very, very demanding, very pushy."

Yermak established himself as Ukraine's primary contact with the U.S. early in the war, muscling rivals out of the way. Internally, the Biden administration called Yermak an "operator," with his hands in every aspect of Ukrainian governance, according to former Biden officials.

Former Biden administration officials said they viewed Yermak as an obstacle to anticorruption efforts. When Biden aides pushed to remove several members of Zelensky's circle who they believed were involved in graft, Yermak refused.

European officials said Yermak successfully pushed Zelensky to remove Ukraine's foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who was widely popular with his Western counterparts. Some Western officials saw the move as part of a troubling pattern: Yermak was narrowing the circle of people who had access to Zelensky, preventing the president from hearing bad news and different viewpoints.

On some issues, Yermak negotiated effectively, according to Western officials. When Biden's team was reluctant to transfer some weapons -- like Abrams tanks -- Yermak orchestrated a media campaign to pressure the White House to change course, former Biden administration officials said.

At other times, though, Western officials saw his initiatives as unworkable. In 2023 and 2024, he organized a series of meetings with foreign officials, apparently convinced that if other countries signed onto a peace plan favorable to Ukraine, Moscow could be forced to go along. One former Biden official said U.S. and allied aides would roll their eyes whenever Yermak would leave the room after he presented these plans.

Some in Washington lay much of the blame on Yermak for Zelensky's disastrous February meeting with President Trump. For weeks before the meeting, Ukraine's supporters in Washington backchanneled with Yermak, offering advice on how to make a good impression.

They said Zelensky's team ignored that advice, leading to a blowup in the Oval Office, after which Trump briefly suspended aid to Kyiv.

In the months since, however, even Yermak's detractors in Washington say that he has effectively learned how to work with the Trump administration. As proof, they point to his meeting with Rubio in Geneva, which Rubio called "probably [the] best meeting and day we've had so far in this entire process, going back to when we first came to office in January."

Volker said that Yermak and Zelensky had learned "that you don't just get into a position of rejecting something that Trump says. You get out of the public eye, you negotiate behind closed doors, you discuss, you propose, you come up with things that are reasonable, and you can make progress that way, but don't go into these public confrontations."

"The Trump team is very difficult to work with for Ukraine," Volker added. "I think Yermak is as good as anybody in managing the world of 'OK, this is the United States we've got right now, so we have to work with it.'"

Anger in Ukraine over the U.S. peace proposal -- and subsequent negotiations to bend it more in Ukraine's favor -- briefly quieted the shouts to remove Yermak. But the search of Yermak's home on Friday has turned the country's focus back on him, with calls for Zelensky to dismiss him growing louder than ever.

"Mr. President, you must URGENTLY dismiss your head of the [office of the president] Yermak," Yaroslav Zheleznyak, a member of the opposition Holos party, wrote Friday morning on social media. "Any attempt to talk about this decision, to delay it, to appoint Yermak to another 100,500 negotiation groups, to transfer him to another position -- this will simply be a direct blow to the crumb of trust that society still has."

Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former Ukrainian economy minister, said it would be very difficult for Zelensky to justify keeping Yermak. But he added that Yermak would also be difficult to replace.

"Yermak is very experienced. He's been leading the negotiations," Mylovanov said. Though there are plenty of capable people who could step into the role, he said, "they will face a steep learning curve, and that's critical during the middle of negotiations."

Write to Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com, Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 28, 2025 10:14 ET (15:14 GMT)

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