Joe Biden played a role in pushing out Ukraine’s prosecutor general
The part of the story that involves Joe Biden directly centers on the ouster of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.
In February 2015, Shokin became Ukraine’s prosecutor general, and promised critics of his country’s anti-corruption efforts at home, in the US, and at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that a clean-up was on the way. And he claimed Burisma
was in his sights.
But Shokin’s deputy, Vitaly Kasko, told
Bloomberg that the promise was empty rhetoric. According to Kasko, their office did nothing to pursue its investigation into Zlochevsky throughout 2015, and the office was ineffective at reining in corruption generally, leading him to resign in frustration.
Shokin has disputed Kasko’s narrative, but the manner in which he was running his office also concerned the US ambassador to Ukraine, who said publicly in September 2015 that the office was “subverting” the UK’s investigation.
Concern at the embassy mounted, and by 2016, officials there began suggesting the Obama administration push for the prosecutor general’s ouster. In particular, the embassy suggested that $1 billion in loan guarantees the country hoped to receive from the US in order to stay solvent should be tied to a tougher anti-corruption strategy that involved removing officials seen as blocking progress, namely Shokin.
It wasn’t just the US that wanted Shokin gone, either — many other Western European officials, including the IMF’s then-managing director Christine Lagarde,
also insisted Ukraine was doing far too little about corruption.
So in March 2016, Biden says he told the Ukrainian government that their loan guarantees would be cut off unless they removed Shokin. He told the story at a session at the
Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours,” Biden told his audience. “I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’”
The former vice president said after the threat, “Well, (sniped for profanity) he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
But though Biden may have taken credit for it, this was hardly his unique idea. “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked,” Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council,
told the Wall Street Journal. “The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD, everybody was united that Shokin must go, and the spokesman for this was Joe Biden.”
The people of Ukraine wanted Shokin gone as well, and demonstrated for his removal around the time of Biden’s threat. Shortly after that demonstration, Shokin was dismissed.
