Day 1568
The cultivation problem
There is a Ukrainian word, vyroshchuvaty (вирощувати) — to cultivate, to grow, as one grows vegetables or children — that Roman Chervinsky uses seven times in the space of thirty minutes. He uses it the way a farmer uses it, without drama, as a description of ordinary agricultural work. You plant a seed in the correct soil, you water it, you wait. Eventually it grows into whatever you needed it to grow into. The fact that the seed is a human being, and the soil is a Ukrainian intelligence agency, and what it grows into is an agent of a foreign power, does not, in Chervinsky’s telling, make the process less agricultural. It makes it more so.
Chervinsky is worth listening to. He was, until the state decided otherwise, the head of counterintelligence for Ukraine’s Security Service. He knows how these gardens work because he spent years tending one. He knows how they are infiltrated because he watched it happen. He knows the specific smell of a cultivated asset — the slightly-too-good results, the exchanges that succeed where others failed, the quiet accumulation of presidential trust — because he was trained to recognize it. And then, in a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, the state he served charged him with crimes and made him the subject of the very machinery he had once operated. He mentions this with the equanimity of a man who has had time to find it funny.
What follows is his chronology. I have translated it as faithfully as I can.
It begins, as so many Ukrainian stories begin, in 2019.
A man named Dmytro Shtanko is making recordings. He is recording Denys Yermak — the younger brother of Andriy Yermak, who will become the most powerful man in Ukraine — and Denys Yermak is explaining, with the candor available only to people who do not yet know they are being recorded, exactly how the new government will work.
“People were appointed to positions,” Chervinsky says, “so that they would do their jobs but remember who appointed them, and what their main tasks were. They were to form financial flows directed toward the new elite of the country.”
The new elite, Denys Yermak explains on the recording, is organized on a family principle. “Z-Yermak. Their fathers are friends too. They traveled to Tibet together.” And then, in September or October of 2019 — before Bohdan has been fired, before the Paris summit, before Oman — Denys Yermak says the following: “Soon my brother will be head of the Presidential Office.”
Dmytro Shtanko, who made these recordings, was subsequently sent to the front. He was placed on a forward observation post at Bakhmut — beyond Ukrainian lines, Chervinsky specifies, not at them — and he was kept there for a month. He did not survive the month.
Chervinsky mentions this without raising his voice.
The Paris summit of December 2019. Z meets Putin for the first time as president. The Normandy Format. Andriy Bohdan is in the delegation. Nothing is resolved. Something is, apparently, communicated — or rather, the absence of what was expected to be communicated is communicated.
What had been expected: a signing. Another negotiator — Surkov — had reportedly reached agreement with Z on a soft handover of the Donbas, the literal implementation of the Minsk accords. A fully agreed document was waiting. Merkel and Hollande were present as witnesses. Z flew from Kyiv to Paris to sign it.
Somewhere over Poland, he changed his mind. He understood that the moment of signing would be, upon his return to Kyiv, the first act of a civil war — and the last act of his own political career. So instead of signing, he told Putin, in front of Merkel and Hollande, why Putin was wrong.
Such things are not forgotten by anyone. They are especially not forgotten by people as easily wounded as Putin. He did not forget. He added to this war, among all its other dimensions, the character of a deep personal enmity. From that moment in Paris, Putin’s feelings toward Z could be described, borrowing from a Russian film, as a personal antipathy so intense he cannot eat.
“The conversation in France didn’t go the way Z wanted with Putin,” Chervinsky says — which is one way of putting it. “Apparently the promises weren’t kept — whatever Z had promised, whatever he’d envisioned about how he’d negotiate with Putin, what he’d talk about.”
Shortly after Paris, there is a trip to Oman. Yermak goes. Bohdan does not.
“What was in that Oman?” Chervinsky asks. “That’s the big question. And after this, Yermak is appointed head of the Presidential Office.”
His interpretation is precise: “In Oman, they most likely showed Z who should be head of the office — through whom there could be direct communication, communication that would lead to the results Z wanted at that time.”
Bohdan is fired shortly afterward. No explanation is given. He has been, in Chervinsky’s reconstruction, a normal chief of staff — organizing the president’s schedule, handling legal and economic matters, the things he was actually trained for. But this is not what the Presidential Office is needed for. “His main task and goal — he wanted to show himself as a talented diplomat from the people, who could negotiate with Russia and organize peace. Very quickly, unlike Poroshenko.” Bohdan cannot provide this. Yermak can. Or rather: Yermak is being grown to provide it.
The cultivation of Yermak proceeds through prisoner exchanges.
“Russia was cultivating its asset in the eyes of President Z himself,” Chervinsky says. “They showed Z that only this man could solve Ukraine’s most critical problems. And that’s how they installed him.”
The method is consistent. Identify an ambitious figure with access to the principal. Manufacture results. Allow him to succeed at things others have failed at. Watch him rise. Chervinsky traces this pattern across three generations of asset cultivation: Viktor Medvedchuk and his back-channel relationships, Volodymyr Ruban and his prisoner exchanges, and now, in what Chervinsky presents as the current live operation, HUR’s Dmytro Usov. “The same thing is happening in the HUR environment. They have this Dmytro Usov, who is also supposedly a talented negotiator and exchanger, together with Budanov. But I believe the Russians are again cultivating their asset in our corridors of power and intelligence agencies.”
A note on names: Dmytro Usov — HUR deputy head and keeper of the direct back-channel to Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) General Alexander Zorin since March 2022 — should not be confused with Andriy Yusov, HUR’s representative for strategic communications and adviser to the Presidential Office. The Usov-Zorin channel, initially used only for prisoner and war dead exchanges, became the most stable line of communication between the two sides throughout the war; it was through this channel that the Azovstal surrender and release was negotiated in May 2022. When Budanov was elevated to Presidential Office chief in January 2026 and Oleh Ivashchenko installed as the new HUR head, Usov became the senior continuity figure in HUR’s Russia negotiations — his structural position quietly strengthened at precisely the moment Chervinsky’s warning about his cultivation was being recorded. As for Yusov: in February 2026, Ukrainian and Moldovan law enforcement disrupted a Russian-directed contract killing operation; Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko confirmed Yusov was among the intended targets. Different men, similar names, same building.
There is, in the exchanges themselves, a specific example that Chervinsky presents not as interpretation but as documented fact. The exchange of Tsemakh — a witness in the MH17 investigation, handed to Russia in 2019 as part of the deal that returned the Kerch Strait sailors. The sailors were already coming back, Chervinsky says. The International Maritime Court had ruled. Sanctions for non-compliance were the next step. By including Tsemakh in the exchange, Z resolved Putin’s problem, not Ukraine’s. “Z solved more of Putin’s problems than Ukraine’s problems, because the guys were about to arrive in Ukraine anyway.”
The appointment of Oleksandr Lytvynenko as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service — the SZRU — comes in July 2021.
Chervinsky notes, as others have noted, that Lytvynenko studied at the FSB academy through 1994. He notes it without the outrage that a less experienced man might bring to it, the way a doctor notes a patient’s relevant history. What matters is not the academy. What matters is what happens in August.
In August 2021, one month after his appointment, Lytvynenko begins dissolving the SZRU’s department responsible for tracking Russia. This is the unit that has been reporting on troop buildups, axes of advance, invasion preparations. “He quietly disbanded the department,” Chervinsky says. “And by December it was gone.”
The documentary intelligence reports do not stop being produced. They stop being transmitted accurately. “These documentary reports, he simply didn’t take them into account, or even produced opposite reports — that there would be no war — and informed the president accordingly.”
Meanwhile, Z is telling the CIA that Ukrainian intelligence is superior and there will be no war. “He constantly boasted about his Ukrainian intelligence and informed the CIA representative that their intelligence was good, but ours was better, and there would be no war, everything would be fine.” The CIA representative was telling him otherwise. The Ukrainian intelligence agencies, penetrated and misdirected, were telling him to concentrate forces in the east. The northern approaches to Kyiv were demined. Defensive positions were removed. “The armed forces, the overwhelming majority of all efforts and forces, were moved predominantly there, to the east, to the JFO zone.”
On February 24, Russia came through the north. And through Chonhar, “where everything had been demined, defensive positions removed, the units that defended these positions removed.” Kyiv was held by one battalion of the 72nd Brigade, based at Bila Tserkva. “And fortunately, everyone who didn’t flee Kyiv, didn’t leave Kyiv — well, except women — took up weapons and went to show that they were ready to defend Kyiv.”
“The intelligence service,” Chervinsky says, “performed a destructive function — it put the existence of the entire country at risk.”
All of these people remain in their positions. “These intelligence officers are still in warm baths. They are not afraid to be here in Ukraine, even though they are effectively the guilty parties.”
Lytvynenko was not sent to Serbia. He was promoted. In March 2024, he was appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, replacing Oleksiy Danilov. He held that post until July 2025.
On the sanctions against Bohdan, Chervinsky is brief and surgical.
“Sanctions are the kind of thing you can impose, and then go ahead and prove you’re not guilty.” No criminal case has been opened. No charges filed. Four of the five people sanctioned in the same decree are Russians — providing legal camouflage for the real target. “He places Bohdan in the same row as them. This is already absurd and frankly funny.”
The purpose is not legal. The purpose is informational. “This is pure populism, aimed simply at changing the topic being discussed in society — especially in the more sober opposition part of society, where everyone clearly understands that the president’s inner circle was robbing the country during the most difficult period for our country.”
Bohdan, Chervinsky notes, has been abroad for at least three years. He has no media presence in Ukraine, no business interests, no mechanism of influence. “How can he cause harm to Ukraine if he has no influence, no business here? None. This is simply Z’s fear. This is paranoia.”
As for what Bohdan actually knows: “I hope Bohdan has enough insider information that he can communicate, and it can genuinely destroy Z’s authority and his image as a non-corrupt honest guy from the people who is trying to fight the system. Because Bohdan genuinely has enough information about how all of this began — where the money came from for all their processes, for the election campaign, and so on.”
Z, Chervinsky suggests, knows this too. He is hitting preemptively. If Bohdan speaks, it will be reframed: he is doing it for personal revenge, he has an axe to grind, he was fired and never forgave it. The sanctions create the narrative in advance.
On the Medvedchuk assets, Chervinsky permits himself one moment of controlled contempt.
Medvedchuk’s media empire. His fuel stations. His real estate. All confiscated under sanctions. “Where did it go, this empire? It dissolved into Yermak’s pockets. The stations were renamed and simply kept working. We don’t know who owns them and how all of this happened. There’s no transparency here.”
No public accounting. No court proceedings explaining the disposition of assets. The stations are operating under new names. Who owns them is not a question the state has found time to answer.
The closing argument is, in some ways, the most interesting one, because it is the argument that explains everything else.
The corruption exposés — the Mindich recordings, the Yermak wiretaps, the dynasty mansions, the drone procurement schemes — are not, in Chervinsky’s reading, simply journalism. They are leverage. “By means of these scandals, by means of this exposure of information about Z’s corrupt circle, they are trying to force him to sign a peace deal in the format that would suit Russia.”
Trump wants a quick signing. Russia wants specific terms. Z, weakened by the corruption of his own circle, weakened by the institutional damage done by the people he trusted and the people they installed, is being squeezed from both sides. “The president has seriously weakened. He has weakened himself through his own corrupt circle. And this gives external forces — in this case both the Russians and the Americans — the ability to put pressure on him and force him toward certain things.”
He resists. The state suffers.
“Our fighters on the front lines deserve this respect — from the whole world, from Europeans, from Americans, from ordinary citizens. And someone is destroying this respect with their corruption, with their arrogance, with their unwillingness to look honestly at what is actually happening in the country.”
The laboratory, as always, belongs to whoever owns the building.