Oleksii Arestovych, a former adviser to the Office of the President of Ukraine, was set to become the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which was intended to serve as a coordinating body for countering information threats from the russian federation. Arestovych himself revealed this in a comment to the Ukrainian News agency.
"Yermak once created the CCD for me—that’s the irony of the situation. He didn’t need it because we needed a centralized executive body to counter disinformation, but because some American acquaintances were providing a lot of money for it—a couple of dozen million dollars—26 or 23, as I recall—offered annually for the fight, which he intended to manage,” Arestovych said.
According to Arestovych, Andrii Yermak repeatedly offered him the position of the head of the agency, but Arestovych refused due to differing views on the principles of the CCD’s operation.
"I wasn’t opposed to it in principle, but when I looked at the staffing table, I discovered that the head of logistics for this agency was scheduled to receive a salary three times higher than that of the head of Ukraine’s Department of Information Warfare. So I asked Yermak right away: what did this strange disparity mean—that the procurement officer, just like you, the Office’s administrative director, has a salary three times higher than the person who counters information threats in the security sphere? And I refused to get involved in this nonsense,” Arestovych noted.
The former presidential adviser also emphasized that, in his opinion, the Center’s operations raise many questions from a legal standpoint.
"This Center was, after all, created within the National Security and Defense Council apparatus, and it—this Center—does not fit into any of the existing regulatory documents governing Ukraine’s information policy. In other words, it is completely outside the law. The regulations governing it are very vague. In short, it’s an office that exists so that Yermak can extract money from the US Democratic Party,” the politician concluded.
As previously reported, in 2025, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree enacting the NSDC’s decision to impose personal sanctions against Oleksii Arestovych, a former non-staff advisor to the head of the Office of the President.
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