The European Commission praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin for his efforts to fight corruption in a December 2015 progress report published nine days after then-VP Joe Biden demanded his ouster.
The report flies in the face of Biden’s claims that the European Union joined his demands that Shokin be removed for being corrupt and obstructing anti-corruption reforms.
In fact, the Dec. 18, 2015, progress report, obtained by the New York Post, says that the European Union was satisfied that Ukraine had achieved “noteworthy” progress, including in “preventing and fighting corruption,” and thus was eligible for visa-free travel in Europe.
The European Commission noted that Shokin had just appointed the head of a specialized anti-corruption prosecution office, which it described as “an indispensable component of an effective and independent institutional framework for combating high-level corruption.”
The new office would help the newly established National Anti-Corruption Bureau combat corruption, the report noted, and urged Ukrainian leadership to ensure that both bodies were “fully operational” by the first quarter of 2016.
But Shokin was gone by March 29, 2016, forced out by Biden’s threats to then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid unless the prosecutor general was fired.
“Based on these commitments, the anti-corruption benchmark is deemed to have been achieved,” the European Commission report found. “The progress noted in the fifth report on anti-corruption policies, particularly the legislative and institutional progress, has continued.”
At the same time, the EU commissioner for migration, home affairs and citizenship issued a public statement on Dec. 18, 2015, praising Shokin and other officials for making “enormous progress” on reform, according to a report by John Solomon from Just the News.
“I congratulate the Ukrainian leadership on the progress made towards completing the reform process which will bring important benefits to the citizens of Ukraine in the future,” then-EU Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos said. “The hard work towards achieving this significant goal has paid off. Now it is important to keep upholding all the standards.”
Biden boasted in 2018 about the pressure campaign he had waged to force the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin, who had been in the job just 13 months, having been appointed as a broom one year after the Maidan revolution ousted the previous corrupt Russia-aligned government.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” said Biden, referring to a $1 billion US loan guarantee, during an event at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
At the time he was removed, Shokin was investigating the corrupt energy company Burisma that was paying Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year to sit on its board.
Shokin’s office issued a warrant to seize all of Burisma owner Mykola Zlochevsky’s properties in Kyiv on Feb. 2, 2016.
Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer testified last month to the House Oversight Committee that Burisma added Hunter to its board so that “people would be intimidated to mess with them … legally.”
Shokin was “a threat” to Burisma, Archer told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“He ended up seizing assets of [Zlochevsky] — a house, some cars, a couple properties. And [Zlochevsky] actually never went back to Ukraine after Shokin seized all of his assets.”
In an interview with The Post last month from his home in Kyiv, Shokin denied that he was corrupt and said he was fired illegally.
He accuses Biden of “interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine” by forcing his removal and described the then-vice president’s threat to withhold US aid as “blackmail.”
Shokin points out that, seven years after his ouster, neither Biden nor anyone else has produced evidence of corruption or wrongdoing by him.
The European Commission’s praise for Ukraine’s progress on anti-corruption reform during Shokin’s tenure echoes internal State Department documents published by Just the News.
A task force of State, Treasury and Justice Department experts had recommended in October 2015 that Ukraine should receive $1 billion in US loan guarantees when Biden traveled to Kyiv in December 2015, because the country had made adequate progress in fighting corruption, Solomon reported last month.
The State Department memos included a personal letter from top US official Victoria Nuland to Shokin telling him that Secretary of State John Kerry was “impressed” with Shokin’s progress.
But Biden, Nuland and others later claimed that the then-VP was simply carrying out official US policy and that European officials agreed that Shokin was corrupt and needed to be removed.
“It was a policy that was coordinated tightly with the Europeans, with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank. But not only did we not see progress, we saw the [Prosecutor General’s Office] go backwards in this period,” Nuland, now Biden’s undersecretary of state, told the Senate Homeland Security and Accountability Committee in 2020.
Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, told the Wall Street Journal in 2019, “Everyone in the Western community wanted Shokin sacked … The whole G-7, the IMF, the EBRD [the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development], everybody was united that Shokin must go, and the spokesman for this was Joe Biden.”
However, none of the European bodies cited ever called specifically for Shokin’s removal or even mentioned his name.
Instead, two months after Biden’s pressure campaign began, bodies such as the IMF issued statements generically criticizing Ukraine’s “slow progress” in fighting corruption.
Meanwhile, Solomon reports that another influential international body was singing the praises of Ukraine’s corruption-busting reforms during Shokin’s tenure.
In an Aug. 19, 2015, report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace singled out Shokin’s office as among the most active on reforms.
“Ukraine has adopted a package of anticorruption laws and established a set of institutions to fight corruption,” said Carnegie’s Ukraine Reform Monitor report. “The general prosecutor’s office has been the agency most active in this agenda.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
