The Anti-Corruption Supreme Court of Ukraine ordered this Thursday the preventive detention of Andri Yermak. Who until six months ago was the right-hand man of Volodymyr Zelenski and head of the office of the president of Ukraine is accused of laundering 460 million hryvnias (about nine million euros) in the construction of a luxury housing development.
Yermak was formally charged last Monday and his imprisonment was only a matter of time. The president’s office was not surprised by the fall of what until recently was the most powerful politician in Ukraine alongside Zelenski. This was commented on Monday by Dmytro Litvin, communications advisor to the head of state, in a phone group with journalists. The question was to know for what crime Yermak would end up in the dock, since the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) were following multiple leads.
Yermak’s home was already searched by anti-corruption authorities in November 2025, as part of Operation Midas, to investigate a network of commissions and laundering of 86 million euros of money from Energoatom, the state atomic energy company. There are nine accused in this case, including former Energy Minister German Galushchenko and former Deputy Prime Minister Oleksi Chernishov. Zelenski has not commented on the scandal.
Chernishov was imprisoned in June 2025, precisely accused of being part of a money laundering network in the real estate sector along with two deputies from Servant of the People, Zelenski’s party. Shortly after Operation Midas began, in November 2025, the digital outlet Bihus revealed that Chernishov is also being investigated for laundering commissions received at Energoatom with the construction of the luxury housing development Dynasty, in the Kiev province. Yermak has now been sent to prison for this real estate project.
“I was not prepared for this. I don’t have that much money but I have enough acquaintances, I hope they can help me.” These are Yermak’s words before the judge when he was told that the bail to get out of jail is 140 million hryvnias (2.7 million euros), according to Ukrainian journalists present in the courtroom. Possibly some of those acquaintances of Yermak are the same who paid Chernishov’s bail in 2025.
The core of the evidence from the anti-corruption bodies are dozens of hours of conversations recorded at the home of Timur Mindich. This businessman was a friend of Zelenski and his partner in Kvartal 95, the audiovisual production company with which the current president became a famous actor years before coming to government. Mindich — who, according to NABU and SAPO, was the mastermind of the plot — fled Ukraine in November, a few hours before his home was searched. He is now a fugitive from Ukrainian justice taking refuge in Israel, a country of which he holds nationality.
Several recordings of Mindich and his circle have become public in these last months of April and May. In one of them, the businessman details, in a conversation with Serhii Shefir (former advisor to Zelenski and also partner in Kvartal 95), how the distribution of properties acquired between Chernishov and deputies Yutri Kisel and Oleksandr Sova worked. These two politicians are also charged with the alleged purchase of votes in Parliament.
Mindich and other influential men in Zelenski’s circle talk in these audios about Yermak as the person who expedited a friendly investment group to take over the privatization of the state bank Sense Bank and the largest petrochemical plant in Ukraine.
In a recording leaked by opposition deputies, Mindich also talks with his team about the details of the construction of a mansion in the Dynasty housing development that has to be for “Vova,” the diminutive they use to refer to Zelenski.
Yermak has been a controversial figure who has made many enemies and a bad reputation, partly due to the accumulation of power he achieved and because he had to play the role of bad cop in his years as Zelenski’s right-hand man (2020-2025). A lawyer by training, he also comes from the entertainment world, like the president.
The latest detail revealed about his time in Zelenski’s office, published Wednesday by the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, is that he supposedly consulted a psychic about the suitability of each candidate for public office that he decided on. The psychic’s expenses are also being investigated by the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office.
One of the fears in Ukrainian public opinion is that corruption scandals at the top of power affect the process of joining the European Union. Katarina Maternova, EU ambassador to Ukraine, assured the Ukrinform agency on Wednesday that it is quite the opposite: “The mere fact that the former head of the presidency appeared before the Anti-Corruption Court shows that anti-corruption institutions are working. And let me reiterate that this is happening in the middle of an invasion,” she said.
