MILES PARKS, HOST: Negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine will continue in Florida this weekend as a Ukrainian delegation arrives to negotiate with the Trump governance. Joining us now with the latest is NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley in Kyiv. Hi, Eleanor.

ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Hi, Miles.

PARKS: so these negotiations won’t include a top Ukrainian negotiator who resigned yesterday. Can you tell us about him?

BEARDSLEY: Well, his name is Andriy Yermak, and he is Zelenskyy’s chief of staff and right-hand man. They go way back to Zelenskyy’s TV days before he was elected president of Ukraine in 2019. Yermak is a film producer and a former business partner of Zelenskyy, and they’ve also worked closely together and even lived together in the fortified government compound in Kyiv as the full-scale invasion.Yermak is not well-liked by Ukrainians, who say he’s amassed too much power and was not the person they voted for. Analysts tell me American and european allies didn’t appreciate him either.

Anyway, he got caught up in the corruption scandal that broke in mid-November, involving at least eight people who are now under examination, several close to Zelenskyy, who are suspected of siphoning off more than $100 million from the state nuclear power agency, and this at a time when Ukrainians are fighting a war and hunkering down under daily power cuts.