Andrii Leonidovych Derkach is a former Ukrainian politician and businessman. In 2020 was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship. In August 2020, U.S. counterintelligence director William Evanina pinpointed Derkach as a key participant in Russian actions to harm Joe Biden’s candidacy in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Derkach, as a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, had been an operational Russian agent for over a decade, keeping close relations with the Russian Intelligence Services.
US intelligence community analysis unleashed in March 2021 found that Derkach was among representatives of Russian intelligence who encouraged and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated reports about Biden “to US media organizations, US officials, and major US individuals, including some comparable to former President Trump and his administration.”
In 2021, the US government blamed Derkach for being a “Russian agent” and sanctioned him for interference in the 2020 US elections, and the Ukrainian administration sanctioned him for spreading Russian propaganda. In April 2021, Forensic News said that Derkach came under the scrutiny of prosecutors probing Russian interference in the presidential election in 2020.
In May 2021 the New York Times proved that prosecutors investigated whether Derkach and other Ukrainians “helped orchestrate a wide-ranging scheme to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign, including using Rudolph W. Giuliani to extend their misleading claims about President Biden and tip the election in Donald J. Trump’s favour.”
In June 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) stated that Derkach received money from the Russian GRU to create private security businesses that Russia planned to use to seize Ukraine and that the Prosecutor General of Ukraine had initiated a pre-trial investigation into his position. In November 2023 Ukrainian police and prosecutors charged Derkach of treason.
