Since Russia invaded almost four years ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has reshuffled his cabinet several times, fired an army chief and regularly endured Russian bombardment, while rallying his country and its Western allies against an existential threat.
Through every crisis, one man has stood at Mr. Zelensky’s side: Andriy Yermak, his chief of staff.
But on Friday, Mr. Yermak stepped down amid a spiraling, $100 million embezzlement scandal that has already led to the dismissal of two cabinet ministers and even threatened to topple Mr. Zelensky’s entire cabinet.
Mr. Yermak, 54, is the highest-level official to lose his job in the fallout from the 15-month investigation called Operation Midas, revealed last week by Ukraine’s top anti-corruption agencies, which said the effort had produced 1,000 hours of wiretaps.
Investigators say that a group of insiders demanded kickbacks of up to 15 percent on contracts awarded by the country’s state-owned nuclear-power giant, including for shelters built to protect power plants from Russian missiles and drones.
Some of Mr. Zelensky’s closest allies have been linked to the scandal, including a former deputy prime minister, a former business partner of Mr. Zelensky and the former energy minister. Mr. Zelensky has tried to distance himself, saying anyone engaged in government corruption should be punished.
Mr. Yermak has not been officially named in the investigation. But on Friday, investigators searched his home in Kyiv.
Earlier this month, an opposition member of Parliament, Yaroslav Zheleznyak, who said he helped feed information to anti-corruption investigators, said that Mr. Yermak was part of the investigation and called for his ouster.
After the investigation was unveiled, Mr. Yermak disappeared from public view for nearly five days, a rare absence for a power broker who had seemed ever-present.
Opposition politicians have said that Mr. Yermak, whose intimidating manner and tendency to micromanage have rubbed many people the wrong way, should be sacked. They have also demanded a vote of no confidence in Parliament. Some members of Mr. Zelensky’s political party, Servant of the People, have indicated that they would vote to join the opposition in a no-confidence vote.
No powerful leader has called for the resignation of Mr. Zelensky, elected president in 2019. Because of the war, elections are suspended. But if a no-confidence vote were to pass, Mr. Zelensky’s cabinet would have to step down, forcing him to form a new cabinet in a much-weakened position.
Behind the scenes, officials have scrambled to contain the crisis. It’s possible that Mr. Yermak agreed to sacrifice himself in a bid to stave off a no-confidence vote. If so, it’s not clear whether that will be enough.
This is the most serious political crisis to face Mr. Zelensky, once a darling of the West for standing up to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after the invasion in February 2022. At a time when many Western officials expected Ukrainian resistance to collapse in a matter of days, Mr. Zelensky refused all offers by international forces to evacuate him, instead holing up in a spartan government bunker below the presidential office complex in Kyiv, the capital.
His face ended up on refrigerator magnets, symbols of defiance sold in tourist shops. He was given lengthy standing ovations in front of Congress and the parliaments of Europe, Britain and Canada.
Most of the time, Mr. Yermak was there. They had known each other for almost a decade by the time Mr. Zelensky took office — Mr. Zelensky, the comic actor, and Mr. Yermak, the media lawyer and occasional film producer.
At first, the new president named Mr. Yermak as a presidential aide who focused on foreign policy issues. Mr. Zelensky relied on him more and more, and in February 2020, Mr. Yermak became chief of staff and a towering figure in Ukraine. He slept in the same underground bunker in Kyiv near Mr. Zelensky after the invasion, and the president consulted him at all hours. He was available when Mr. Zelensky woke in the morning, and late at night, when Mr. Zelensky gave his daily video address.
In any photograph of Mr. Zelensky in any world capital, Mr. Yermak was the much taller, beefier man in military garb standing nearby or bending down to whisper in the president’s ear. In the political sphere in Kyiv, Mr. Yermak became a feared hatchet man known for removing any government official who spoke out of turn or became too popular, a potential rival to him or to Mr. Zelensky.
Even in 2021, a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, The Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in the Ukrainian capital, described Mr. Yermak as having “a somewhat sinister reputation in the media as a power-greedy and Machiavellian politician.”
He took the arrows for Mr. Zelensky, absorbing criticism over what was happening in the war or in Washington. Some said that he was the power behind the throne, a kind of puppeteer pulling Mr. Zelensky’s strings. Others, including Mr. Zelensky himself, said he was executing Mr. Zelensky’s wishes.
“I respect him for his results, he does what I tell him,” Mr. Zelensky said in response to a question about Mr. Yermak’s powerful role from a Bloomberg reporter in July 2024. Attacks against his chief of staff, Mr. Zelensky added, were actually against the president.
In the West, mounting questions about corruption were largely overshadowed by the war, until July of this year. As it became clear that the anticorruption agencies were zeroing in on Mr. Zelensky’s circle of allies, he and his party pushed through a law stripping the agencies of their independence, and a prominent investigator for one agency was arrested. Facing furious mass protests, the first of his presidency, Mr. Zelensky quickly backtracked and the law was rescinded.
But even before then, Mr. Yermak had grown deeply unpopular in Ukraine. A poll in March by the Razumkov Center, a Ukrainian think tank, showed 60 percent of the respondents trusted Mr. Zelensky. Only 17.5 percent trusted Mr. Yermak.
Yet Mr. Zelensky long trusted him with everything, even to continually press the United States for more military help — and even after Washington insiders made it clear that Mr. Yermak rubbed them the wrong way.
One senior official in the Biden administration described Mr. Yermak as a shock absorber for Mr. Zelensky, the man willing to be the object of everyone’s ire, protecting the president.
After the disastrous Oval Office meeting between Mr. Zelensky and President Trump in February, senior Trump administration officials said they passed private messages to their Ukrainian counterparts that Mr. Zelensky should fire Mr. Yermak because he was abrasive and, in part, because he needed an English translator.
But Mr. Zelensky kept him on. The Trump administration did not push harder.
Adam Entous contributed reporting.
Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.
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