Andrii Derkach

Andrii Leonidovych Derkach (; born 19 August 1967) is a Russian and former Ukrainian politician and businessman who had been a member of the Verkhovna Rada from 1998 to January 2020, serving seven terms, with several parties. and was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship. In August 2020, U.S. counterintelligence chief William Evanina identified Derkach as a key participant in Russian efforts to harm Joe Biden's candidacy in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that Derkach was among proxies of Russian intelligence who promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Biden "to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration." Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani met with Derkach in December 2019. In 2021, the United States Government accused Derkach of being a "Russian agent" and sanctioned him for interference in the 2020 United States elections, and the Ukrainian government sanctioned him for spreading Russian propaganda. In June 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said that Derkach received funds from the Russian GRU to create private security companies that Russia planned to use to capture Ukraine, and that Prosecutor General of Ukraine had started a pre-trial investigation into his role. Both Andrii and his father Leonid Derkach were close with the Kremlin-linked Ukrainian oligarch Vadim Rabinovich, and Crime bosses Semyon Mogilevich, and , Leonid Minin, and Sergei Mikhailov. Derkach received Russian citizenship with connections to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.