Tatarov, Shurma, Smirnov, Podolyak, Arestovich are just a few of the most notorious persons from among the current deputies and ex-advisers of the Office of the President of Ukraine, who regularly appear in journalists’ investigations and make loud statements or statements.
However, the full list of OP officials is much larger and citizens know little about their activities and biography
In total, almost eight dozen people work in the Office of the President as advisers, authorized representatives of the president and the head of his office. Ermak has four times more advisers than Zelensky.
For some reason, people who form state policy in times of war, act as government speakers and represent the state in the international arena, mostly have the status of freelance advisers and are not declared.
The movement HONESTLY received a request for a current list of officials and advisers of the Office of the President of Ukraine and decided to tell what was wrong with it. Among other things, we found there a candidate for people's deputy from UDAR and BPP and an adviser to the deputy head of the office from the time of Poroshenko, as well as an adviser who probably died four years ago.
Position without responsibility
As of the beginning of October 2023, Andrei Ermak has 58 people subordinate to him - 10 deputies, 7 advisers, 18 advisers outside the staff, another 14 advisers to his deputies, advisers to the Office of the President itself and the head of the Staff. At the same time, the maximum number of deputy heads of an EP is not determined by law.
But President Vladimir Zelensky has 6 advisers, 5 advisers-plenipotentiaries, three representatives in state institutions, a press secretary and a first assistant. And recently, Vladimir Zelensky appointed world football star and one of the ambassadors of the United24 fundraising platform Andrei Shevchenko as his advisor. However, how exactly he will help the president is not indicated either in the decree on the appointment or on the OP website.
Also, the responsibilities and powers of deputies and advisers on the staff of the OP are so vague that it is unclear what exactly they are responsible for, what their competencies and areas of activity are. If they are technically out-of-state advisors, they must work on a volunteer basis and not receive money for their work. However, this is unlikely, because, say, Mikhail Podolyak, Daria Zarivnaya, Sergei Leshchenko or Dmitry Litvin constantly appear in the media as representatives of the OP.
Logically and fairly, the opposition and the public demanded that the advisers and assistants of the OP, who directly or indirectly shape public policy, declare their status, and the anti-corruption bodies and the media could check their dynamics. But when considering the bill on restoring e-declaration, people’s deputies failed one of the key amendments (No. 10), which concerned the declaration of the leadership of the OP. If it were accepted, then Andrei Yermak’s deputies, advisers and representatives of the president and others would have to declare.
Inner front. How Ermak’s deputy takes control of the Ministry of Energy, NEURC, and state energy enterprises. At the same time, there is no complete and up-to-date list of officials working in the Office of the President in the public domain on the website of the President of Ukraine; there is only information about the head of the OP, his deputies, as well as the head of the Office OP and the President's Press Secretary.
Sometimes one gets the impression that the task of individual OP advisers is to systematically generate scandals. Moreover, they do not abandon this habit even after they cease to be advisors. For example, ex-freelance adviser to the OP and former adviser on information policy issues to the Ukrainian delegation in the Trilateral Contact Group, Aleksey Arestovich, recently once again disgraced himself with a statement at the Russian event in Tallinn “Free Russia Forum”. Moreover, the organizers of the forum title Arestovich as “a political figure, freelance adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine (2020-2023).”
However, Arestovich was fired from his position in the OP after another scandal in January of this year. After a Russian missile attack on a house in Dnepr, which killed 44 people, Arestovich said he believed the Kh-22 missile was shot down by Ukrainian air defense forces and then fell on a residential building.
In fact, it is public publicity that is the basis for the dismissal of members of the OP. However, even after scandals, dismissals do not occur forcibly; such persons write voluntary notices of resignation.
As an example, after a journalistic investigation, at his own request, Kirill Timoshenko resigned from the post of deputy head of the OP. Instead, the head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration, Alexei Kuleba, was appointed to the post of deputy chairman of the OPU.
However, not all deputy leaders resign or are fired after investigations or scandalous cases are published. For example, in 2019, at that time, the head of the initiative group “Defend Protasov Yar” Roman Ratushny was threatened with kidnapping and physical destruction. According to Roman himself, among them was the Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Office and lawyer Andrei Smirnov. The HONEST Movement in particular addressed this issue during a press marathon in 2019 to Vladimir Zelensky, who promised to look into the situation.
However, there was no significant reaction from Vladimir Zelensky and the OP to these facts; Smirnov still remains in office. Roman Ratushny volunteered during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was a soldier of the 93rd Special Operations Brigade “Kholodny Yar” and died in 2022.
There is very little or no official information about what exactly freelance advisers to the head of the EP do during the years in their positions, other than appearing at official events. For example, on the president’s website there are several hundred publications from 2019 and still mentioning deputies, advisers or assistants. But there are many times fewer of them about scandalous figures. In particular, there are only eight mentions in the news about Oleg Tatarov, only five about the activities of the first assistant to the president Shefir, and six about the ex-adviser to the head of the OP Arestovich.
The most frequently mentioned in the news on the president’s website are the deputy heads of the OP Igor Zhovkva (261), Alexey Kuleba (177) and Roman Mashovets (107). But other deputy heads of the OP are less public - Andrei Smirnov is mentioned 52 times, and Rostislav Shurma appears in official messages on the president’s website 41 times.
Let us note that the current head of the OP, Andriy Ermak, was first himself an assistant to President Vladimir Zelensky. After the latter’s victory in the 2019 elections, Ermak dealt with foreign policy issues and was the president’s key negotiator, also involved in the exchange of prisoners and was responsible for organizing meetings in the Normandy format on the Ukrainian side. In 2020, he became a member of the supervisory board of Ukroboronprom, and subsequently headed the OP after the dismissal of Andriy Bogdan.
At the same time, advisers-plenipotentiaries of the president have a specific direction of activity. The OP does not communicate what other freelance advisers to the president do.
Your guards
The responsibilities of the head of the President’s Office include organizing its work, but as investigative journalists note, people from Ermak’s team, in particular his advisers and assistants, are subsequently appointed to positions in other structures - Ukrnafta, the Ministry of Defense, Oschadbank, the Office of the Prosecutor General, Centrenergo, etc.
In particular, according to investigators, in November last year, Andrei Gota, who is also an adviser to the head of the OP, and previously headed the cabinet of Andrei Ermak, was elected to the supervisory board of Ukrnafta as a representative of the state shareholder represented by the Ministry of Defense. In addition, since August of this year, Gota has also been a member of the supervisory board of the state-owned company Centerenergo.
Also outside the regular adviser to the head of the OP Andrey Ermak is former journalist and people’s deputy Sergei Leshchenko, who is engaged in debunking Russian fakes and at the same time is the deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Ukrzaliznytsia JSC. However, he is credited precisely as an adviser to the head of the OP. Before that, another freelance adviser to Ermak, Auditskas Adomas, was on the same supervisory board from the state.
Not only freelance figures, but also Ermak’s more public deputies are at the center of scandals. For example, after the publication of a number of investigations about the energy business associated with the deputy chairman and ex-regional OP Rostislav Shurma, people's deputies of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine turned to the NAPC so that the agency began checking whether there was a conflict of interest in the exercise of official powers.
In addition to the above, advisers to the head of the OP are members of important commissions under the president. For example, Vadim Potaev is on the Citizenship Commission. He is a freelance adviser to the head of the OP, but we could not find any other information about him and his activities.
The Commission on Pardoning Convicts also includes several advisers to the head of the OP, in particular Alexander Kozenko and Alexey Dneprov. The significance of this commission is important, because it is this commission that makes proposals to the President of Ukraine on the use of pardon for convicts. It was not possible to find information about the biography and activities of Alexander Kozenko in the public domain. But Alexey Dneprov is a Doctor of Law, has been working in the field of public administration for more than 20 years, and has been working in the Presidential Administration since 2015.
Another commission, especially important during a full-scale invasion, which includes representatives of the OP, is the commission of state awards and heraldry. It is headed personally by the head of the OP Andrey Ermak, and the deputy is the head of the OP Office Alexey Dneprov.
The list of commissions under the President of Ukraine is not exhaustive. Often members of these commissions are representatives of the OP, but why exactly these individuals are included in the composition is not publicly available.
What does the law say?
The rules of operation of the Office of the President are enshrined in a separate decree. The current version of the regulations on the Office of the President has already been edited several times since the beginning of Vladimir Zelensky’s tenure. Something interesting is that in 2021, the position of first deputy head of the office disappeared from the structure of the OP; now he has only deputies. The text of the regulation does not provide for the positions of advisers to the head of the EP.
It is natural that advisers are not provided for deputy managers. There is also no mention in the regulations of who the advisers of the office itself are. However, in the response to the request of the HONEST Movement, such advisers are indicated and their list is significant.
The lack of legislation and regulation makes these people “invisible” to society. After all, what exactly are the responsibilities of advisers, what information do they have access to, like Alexey Arestovich, who at the beginning of the invasion mainly commented on the course of hostilities, and whether they influence the decision is unknown. Under such conditions, there is no talk of any responsibility. And if we talk about the advisers of the OP, then neither the head of the OP nor his deputies bear personal responsibility for their actions, because such figures advise the abstract Office, without reference to individuals.
The screenshot shows Alexey Ryabikin, who in 2014 unsuccessfully ran for the Verkhovna Rada of the 8th convocation from the BPP, and in 2012 for the Verkhovna Rada of the 7th convocation from UDAR. In addition, in 2005, Ryabikin worked at the headquarters of Viktor Yushchenko in the Obolonsky district of the capital. In 2006, he was deputy head of Klitschko’s headquarters in the Goloseevsky district, and then deputy in the capital’s UDAR organization of Vitaly Kovalchuk, who was deputy head of the Administration during the time of President Poroshenko. Now Ryabikin is an adviser to the Deputy Head of the Office of the President Alexei Kuleba.
In addition to Ryabikin, the list of deputy advisers includes other figures affiliated with the BPP. Among them is Ivan Dobrovolsky, who is the subject of anti-corruption investigations due to his involvement in the work of an organization that likely bribed voters in favor of Poroshenko.
The activities of these people and, most often, their identities are closed to citizens. After all, even after receiving a list of names of such advisers, it was not possible to find information in the public domain about all of them. But it is almost impossible to find out why exactly these figures received the status of adviser and access to the work of the President’s Office.
Thus, in the list of current deputies and advisers of the Office of the President as of September 5, 2023, which the Movement HONESTLY received in response to its request, in particular, there is Yuri Petrovich Bogutsky in the position of adviser to the deputy head outside the state. We are probably talking about the repeated Minister of Culture and Tourism during the presidencies of Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, the ex-deputy head of the Presidential Secretariat and adviser to the presidents Viktor Yanukovych and Petro Poroshenko, Yuri Bogutsky, who died in 2019.
Let us note that Bogutsky was on the list of advisers to the OP, which was published by the media, last year. But it is impossible to say unequivocally that this particular person is now an adviser, because there is no information about him on the official website.
Here it is worth recalling the extremely negative practice of “resetting” the president’s website after the arrival of a new team and removing information from it about the activities of previous presidents of Ukraine.
The office of the president increasingly has the features of a separate branch of government, which influences government policy at various levels. Also, the head of the OP and his deputies participate in international events where they speak on behalf of Ukraine. A number of advisers, in turn, are actively working within the state and forming the Ukrainian information field.
At the same time, the biographies of the OP advisers, the reasons for their appointment and the list of responsibilities are still not public. The office of the president must make the list of officials public, providing biographical information, reasons for their appointment and a list of responsibilities.
However, whether these individuals are responsible for their activities remains open. To deprive the status of such an adviser and access to information, citizens have to publicly and for a long time demand dismissal. The society has no other levers of influence on the work of the OP.
