Do we like them?

Do we like Andriy Yermak?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Thin record on the harm side and an unresolved court case on the good-person side, so the middle of the scale is honest.

Yermak is a Kyiv lawyer who moved into film production and then into politics. He met Volodymyr Zelensky through the TV business and ended up running the Office of the President from early 2020, becoming one of the most powerful unelected people in Ukraine during the war.

His exit was dramatic. In late November 2025 anti-corruption investigators searched his home, and Zelensky announced his resignation soon after, a day before talks with US envoys on the peace plan. He then said he was heading to the front, though later reporting questioned whether he ever enlisted.

On the harm check we found nothing: no reported statements against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or climate action, and no sign he has pushed conspiracy theories. That is partly because he spent his career in the background rather than as a public commentator. In Geneva in November 2025 he led Ukraine's delegation as the US peace plan was cut back from its original draft, which people will judge differently depending on their view of the war.

Honestly, the good stuff is hard to pin down from what we could open. His office was behind the Bring Kids Back UA push to return children taken to Russia or occupied areas, which reports credit with returning more than a thousand children. We couldn't read the full case documents, so treat this as a thin file.

So where does that leave us? Not a villain on the evidence we saw, not a hero either. The corruption case is serious, he denies it, and it hasn't been decided, so the fair call is to wait and watch.