“Everyone has had it with Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The second most powerful man in Ukraine, Yermak has been a particularly frustrating interlocutor for the Trump administration, according to 10 people familiar with his interactions,” according to a US political news outlet.
On Thursday, a Trump-critical (and by all inferences, pro-Ukraine) political magazine published a consensus of the interviews contending that the general vibe between Zelensky’s right-hand man and US officials was souring, at best.
“On a last-minute trip to Washington at the beginning of June, Yermak struggled to secure meetings with senior Trump administration officials, according to five people familiar with the visit, some of whom had direct knowledge of scheduling issues,” according to a report in Politico.
The Zelensky aide “came without a clear agenda, and the feedback from those he met with was ‘we don’t know why he’s here,’ one of the people familiar with the visit said.
“A meeting between Yermak and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was canceled at the last minute, the person said. But, they said, Yermak ended up bumping into Rubio, who also serves as acting national security adviser, in the White House,” Politico wrote.
A Yermak spokesperson, Oleksiy Tkachuk, disagreed with the assessment by Politico, telling the magazine that Yermak met with Rubio in his office at the White House, but that “a meeting with [Chief of Staff Susie] Wiles went ahead as planned but was shorter than initially expected.”
In recent weeks, Trump and his administration have cut short many meetings with Ukrainian officials and representatives of nations that support Kyiv. The US president famously flew back early from the G7 meeting in Canada last week, before a planned meeting with Zelensky.
Team Trump’s recent view of Eastern European politics came out on Sunday in the New York Times Magazine.
In an article titled “The Romania Plot” in the magazine version, the author showed how MAGA fixers there earlier in June, including Donald Trump, Jr. were intent on tearing down the NATO-friendly candidate in Romanian presidential elections and railed against since-proven accusations that Moscow had interfered in the first round of votes, resulting in the victory of an anti-Western candidate, that was later declared void by Romania’s Constitutional Court.
The take-away message from that article was that MAGA-fans of Trump, and many in Trump’s inner circle, are suspicious of any criticism of the Kremlin’s malfeasance (as the president himself was once investigated for his own “collusion” with Moscow in the 2016 elections) and are happy to lend their leverage to pro-Russian and anti-NATO forces to prevail in Eastern European elections.