One battle after another, or Zelensky between “Midas” and Trump

First, on the 10th, the country woke up to a new reality – after publication by anti-corruption bodies of the so-called “Mindic film”.

Thanks to many months of work by detectives, it became clear that the businessman is close to President Volodymyr Zelenskyi Timur Mindich organized a grand scale of corruption barrier system in energy.

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For several days, the National Anti-corruption Bureau presented one by one new episodes of its “series”, which in political circles had already jokingly dubbed the fourth season of “Servants of the People”.

With each new series, the plot became more and more complicated, there were more and more obscure characters at the very top of the power vertical, and it seemed that it was only a matter of time when the two most sensitive names for the current political elite – Yermak and Zelenskyi – would appear on tapes.

The authorities themselves understood how serious everything was. At least during the last week, I was quietly preparing almost backstage riot that part of the team, which is empowered according to the positions, against the formally powerless, but in fact the most influential architect of the “unified OP vertical” Andriy Yermak.

The meeting of the president with the “Servants of the People” faction on November 20 was supposed to be the apotheosis of this confrontation, when the question of Yermak’s resignation would be raised by the ruba. Small, but not old.

Zelenskyi was helped to keep “his” people in office partly by “home preparations” and partly by the indecision of deputies. However, the main savior of Yermak, surprisingly, was American President Donald Trump. Brought to Kyiv by his emissaries “peace plan” turned out to be so outrageous and unacceptable that Yermak’s fate seemed secondary to it.

So Zelensky not only did not fire Yermak, but also appointed him as the head of the delegation at the negotiations with the USA regarding Dmitriev’s “peace plan” – Witkoff.

However, can the head of OP really breathe easy? Will the system of power come to terms with the fact that the architect of the structure in which “Minditchgate” became a reality remains in office? Were the leaders of the “servants’ uprising” afraid of possible suspicions of treason for disagreeing with the president? In the end, will an external threat be able to stabilize Yermak’s shaky vertical – Zelensky?

“Ukrainian Pravda” tried to answer these questions.

Rebellion of the Lambs: The system rebels against Yermak The name of the head of the President’s Office was not mentioned in the opening series of the published “Mindic films”. However, almost from the first hours of the scandal, when Zelensky was feverishly looking for a solution and asked for advice from all the more or less subjective representatives of his team, the name he had to hear most often was Yermak.

What is the nature of this paradox? The answer is very simple. Anyone who has even a little knowledge of the government system, who has tried to solve something in ministries, law enforcement agencies, the Antimonopoly Committee or ARMA, in regional administrations or Odesa ports, knows that the system of making even the slightest serious decisions consists of two levels: first, the head of the OP, and then, if necessary, the president.

Accordingly, the whole system, faced with the creepy a blow corruption scandal instinctively turned around and pointed out to the president the person who did “Mindichgate” real. Whether Yermak appears on the unpublished tapes, and if so, how exactly, no one in power knows. However, none of the interviewed UP high-ranking officials had even a moment’s doubt that he is there. And that, as in all other spheres, his party is among the “first fiddles” there.

Maybe not so poetically, but in fact the same thing was voiced to the president last week by his security forces, diplomats, government officials, and deputies in private conversations.

On November 20, at a large meeting with the “Servants of the People” faction, the thesis about the need to change the system, Yermak’s resignation and restart the power interaction was to become the main one.

Before the conversation with the president, most of the “servants” from various internal groups in the faction described the situation, if not as a readiness for rebellion, then as a determination to demand a complete reboot of the management system.

But President Zelensky was also preparing for this conversation.

It should be noted that Zelenskyi and Yermak left the country on an international tour literally in the first days of “Mindichgate”. It got into the news as a series of bilateral meetings with memoranda signed in, say, France about a future possible purchase 100 fighters etc.

Let’s ignore the fact that Ukraine does not have money for the salaries of the military for the next year, let alone for hundreds of fighter jets. It is important for our history that Yermak, in his traditional manner, managed to steer Zelensky away from dangerous emotional decisions in Ukraine.

Several days of international trips gave the head of the OP time and space to offer Zelensky the “correct” view of the situation, to find the “culprits” of the outpouring and to show the anger of the deputies as “sabotage” by rebels from within the team.

The main role of such a “political saboteur and traitor” was assigned to none other than David Arahamia, head of the “Servant of the People” faction. Therefore, when the deputies were preparing to meet the president on November 20, the OP seriously intended to charge the head of their faction with treason.

Considering the fact that since the first Istanbul peace talks, Arakhamia has been in contact with a confidant of Kremlin leader Putin – by oligarch Roman Abramovich, the picture of the Russian trail in an attempt to “destabilize the system” seemed almost perfect for technologists in the OP.

The only thing left was to find who would sign such suspicions and make such accusations. And here an interesting thing became clear. Neither the head of the SBU, General Vasyl Malyuk, nor even the “completely own” Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko showed the slightest interest in playing with such a story. Despite threats of resignations and even real preparation for the implementation of these threats.

On that day, Arakhamia was not suspected, but the Leader’s willingness to resort to such voluntarism was enough to dampen his enthusiasm at the faction’s meeting with the president.

So the meeting passed, as it passed, only the People’s Deputy Maryana Bezugla, endowed with the “Hamlet” status, dared to pronounce Yermak’s last name. To her question about the resignation of the head of the OP, a vague answer was received that this is the president’s authority and he will decide for himself.

As a result, the head of the OP kept his position. No one even asked the president about the Secretary of the National Security Council Rustem Umerov, who is also constantly mentioned in the context of the “Mindic films”.

It may seem that everything went as usual – the president overpowered the faction.

However, the meeting looks like a complete victory for the Office only at first glance. There was something new during this conversation that had never been noticed before in the communication between the “Leader” and his “servants”.

When asked how it happened that all people are chosen by the Office, and then they steal hundreds of millions of dollars, the president answered “I don’t know”, then the deputies could not hold back some indignation and some laughter. And this is not the first time that the deputies laughed almost openly. And no with the president

Two days after that, Zelensky went even further in ignoring the will of the deputies and appointed Yermak as the head of the delegation for negotiations Perhaps Bankova’s technologists find such a move even brilliant. However, this may turn out to be a dangerous delusion.

Andriy “Last Called”… in NABU According to the sources of “Ukrainian Pravda” in political and law enforcement circles, over the past two weeks, President Zelenskyi has made many attempts to find out how real the suspicion of the head of his Office is as part of the “Midas” operation.

After all, among the people who “first shook hands” with Zelenskyi, only Andriy Yermak, who is closest to him, remains without suspicion.

And if the Office and the president distance themselves in every possible way from Chernyshov and even Mindich, then the suspicion of corruption for a comrade on whom the president, despite dubious results, has also closed a very responsible international policy, will mean the “end of the era” of friends.

Until the anti-corruption authorities showed the “Mindic tapes”, none of the state leaders realized the seriousness of the situation. Although, according to UP’s contacts among law enforcement officers, even in the winter of this year, the under-controlled security forces warned the president that there could be problems with the deputy prime minister. Instead, Yermak, on the contrary, reassured the guarantor that everything would be fine with Chernyshov.

As you can hear on the published NABU and SAP recordsthe June suspicion of Oleksiy Chernyshov worried even Timur Mindych, with whose approval Deputy Prime Minister Chernyshov also received money. In particular, as it follows from the words of Carlson (Mindic’s operational name on the tapes), it may be about money for the construction of four estates of the “Dynasty” cooperative in Kozyna.

Cooperative “Dynasty”, Kozyn

Since July of this year, when UP first reported that Mindich’s apartment listened to The bombers, OP-controlled bodies and officials, who could, tried to find out at least some details.

“The president jumps when he hears about the Mindich tapes”, – convinced our sources in the law enforcement agencies in August of this year.

However, the level of secrecy of the “Midas” operation turned out to be so serious that until the very publication of the first part of the tapes, the Office was convinced that the problem was exaggerated.

“Perhaps, in general, the story about the tapes was invented in order to save NABU and SAP”, – interlocutors among law enforcement officers shared their impressions immediately after the July attempt to destroy the independence of the anti-corruption vertical.

After the Ukrainian society saw four parts of anti-corruption bodies’ revelations in between blackouts, the president took a waiting break. But not Yermak, who, according to sources of the UP among law enforcement officers, continued to set up security forces under the control of the OP.

“Ali Baba holds meetings and assigns tasks to law enforcement agencies so that they persecute and continue to persecute NABU detectives and SAP prosecutors. This is not a normal story,” – Oleksandr Klymenko, head of SAP, said at one of the conferences in the week when the tapes were made public.

According to UP sources in the anti-corvertical, “Ali Baba” is not the call sign of Andriy Yermak on the “Mindich tapes”. In fact, detectives and prosecutors themselves use this nickname for the conspiracy of the head of the OP in internal communications. The thing is that Andrii Borysovych has been talking about political sidelines for many years they use abbreviations based on the first letters of his name and patronymic – AB.

At the end of the first week of the “Midas” operation, according to interlocutors close to the OP, Volodymyr Zelenskyi called the heads of NABU and SAP to a meeting.

However, “the conversation did not take place,” emphasizes an influential official familiar with the course of that meeting. Immediately after trying to talk, according to the interlocutors in the law enforcement agencies, Yermak once again tasked the security forces to prepare a suspect for the head of the SAP Oleksandr Klymenko.

Bankova continued her attempts to somehow communicate with NABU and SAP for the second week after the publication of the tapes. And in parallel, when the public plane began fill in the speech trackThe office also switched its media “support group”. Now she accused the anti-corruption vertical of working not on Russia, but on the USA, which is pressuring Ukraine to sign an “unprofitable peace”.

Meanwhile, on November 22, Zelensky demonstratively appointed the head of his Office as the head of the delegation for negotiations with the United States and other international partners.

On the one hand, the president is afraid to hand over the topic of negotiations to someone new and is trying to retain people who have been dealing with this issue for the past three years. On the other hand, presiding over critical negotiations should, at least for a while, protect the head of the OP from NABU/SAP claims. Like, who would suspect a person who represents the state at key negotiations.

“He saves him from suspicion,” – one of the representatives of the presidential team immediately commented off the record on Zelenskyi’s decision.

It looks like, at least for now, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is doing everything possible to fulfill at least one of his presidential promises.

“He came with me. He will go with me”– the head of state emphasized in one of the interviews in the distant year 2021. Yermak himself repeated this promise at least twice before and after the start of the full-scale invasion: “I came with this president and I will leave with him.”

An unexpected and heavy peaceful track On the evening of November 20, the residence of Julie Davis, the US chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, on a quiet street in Kyiv, looked calm and ordinary: warm light in the windows, diplomatic cars on the curb, guards moving almost imperceptibly through the corridors.

Journalists invited to a short briefing sat around a round table in one of the offices of the residence. Davies said a brief greeting, unfolded two sheets of paper written by hand, and began to read in a steady, collected voice.

“We have witnessed an absolutely impressive pace of diplomatic activity – one of the most ambitious I have seen in my career.” – she said, not taking her eyes off the text.

The attorney emphasized the unprecedented level of Washington’s involvement and separately noted the role of US Army Minister Daniel Driscoll, who just arrived in Kyiv.

According to her, the American and Ukrainian sides have been working on an “aggressive schedule” in recent days, discussing critical elements of a possible peace plan.

“We will continue these efforts today, tomorrow – we will not stop because this is the peace that cannot wait.” Davis added.

Later, a high-ranking American official specified on the condition of anonymity that during Driscoll’s visit, the Ukrainian side was directly told that there would be “difficult decisions for both sides” ahead.

And despite Davis’s reticence, political circles acknowledge that recent days have been largely overshadowed by discussions surrounding the so-called “28-point plan,” the leak of which has created a buzz and increased anxiety.

The document contained a number of provisions that many perceived as potentially dangerous for Ukraine. American officials now insist that the text was only a draft and did not reflect the actual negotiating positions. However, the leak itself has already affected the atmosphere of discussions and increased distrust in the negotiation process within Ukraine and among its partners.

This is especially noticeable in Europe. Several European diplomats, in private conversations with the U.P., admit that they view the acceleration of American efforts with reserved skepticism. In European capitals, they fear that Washington may try to bring the agreement closer, focusing on its own political calendar, and not on the long-term interests of Ukraine.

Two other European officials warn of the risk of repeating a scenario similar to the Minsk agreements, an agreement that creates the appearance of de-escalation but actually lays the groundwork for future conflict.

Adding to the tension are reports that Washington is considering the possibility of American negotiators going to Moscow after Thanksgiving, that is, on November 27. That is why the American side expects an agreed position from Kyiv regarding further negotiations by this date.

From the words of two people familiar with the course of the negotiations, “Ukrainian Pravda” learned that during the meeting between Driscoll, Zelensky, the head of the OP Andriy Yermak and the Secretary of the NSDC Rustem Umyerov, the issue of NABU and SAP investigations was raised privately.

Interlocutors of the UP, who are familiar with the content of the conversation, claim that Zelensky made it clear that he will not be able to “move on” if anti-corruption authorities soon raise suspicions against members of his closest circle, because such steps could jeopardize negotiations with the United States and European partners.

At the same time, there was a noticeable inconsistency in communication in Washington about the origin and status of the 28-point document.

The group of senators first said that during a telephone briefing, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio allegedly referred to the document as a Russian proposal that was passed on to Steve Witkoff. Senators Mike Rounds and Angus King said Rubio described the document as a “Russian wish list.” This version quickly appeared in the media and reinforced the assumption that there is no unified position in Washington.

In response, the State Department and itself Secretary of State quickly refuted the statement about the “Russian version of 28 points”, stressing that the document was formed in Washington as a framework proposal that takes into account both Ukrainian and Russian ideas.

In the days leading up to these statements, according to UP sources in diplomatic circles, the document was actively promoted by JD Vance and Steve Witkoff. Whereas the role of Driscoll, Vance’s Yale classmate, was to convey the American side’s position to Kyiv.

At the same time, Driscoll is called one of the main contenders for the position of the head of the Pentagon. In particular, for this he needs the success of the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. And that is why this smiling government official so cold-bloodedly announced American ultimatums in Kyiv: either the negotiation process begins, or the aid from the US and the exchange of intelligence are stopped.

From sources in the diplomatic sphere, the UP learned that 28 points were worked out in private by the Americans and Russians during the last two months.

Other interlocutors clarify that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was familiar with the document, but was not its central developer, although he, along with Witkoff and Driscoll, is participating in the negotiations in Switzerland.

When in the midst of “Mindichgate” Secretary of the NSDC Umerov flew on a diplomatic tour “to activate peace talks” and eventually flew to Florida, he ran into these 28 points there.

Fortunately, it is now clear that the document is not final. This was confirmed by US President Donald Trump, answering journalists’ questions. However, the general logic of the proposals is unlikely to be changed.

From the evening of November 23, negotiating delegations of Ukraine and the USA work in Switzerland. They will soon be joined by European leaders, who should help Ukraine press favorable wording and principles into the document.

The whole country (how else) is following the process very closely and wishes success to the Ukrainian delegation. However, should the negotiations pause and the head of the delegation return to Kyiv, internal disappointment and indignation will again come to the fore.

Maybe the OP doesn’t notice it yet, but the system rapidly loses “equation to the flag” and goes astray from a single step.

Sevgil Musaeva, Mykhailo Tkach, Roman Romaniuk, UP