'Rough Country': Ukraine's Burisma Courted Hunter Biden for 'Protection' Amid Oligarch Feuds
21:25 GMT 29.08.2023 (Updated: 13:28 GMT 20.09.2023)
© AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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The story of why Hunter Biden was on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma after the US-backed coup in 2014 shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the dynamics of business in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, nor should the US-orchestrated removal of a prosecutor investigating the firm, a journalist told Sputnik.
Recently, Fox News interviewed Viktor Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general, and asked about the circumstances of his removal from office in 2016.
"I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that [then-Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma," Shokin said.
"[Poroshenko] understood, and so did Vice President Biden, that had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in. That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others,” he continued.
The White House subsequently dismissed Shokin's allegations as "lies" and "debunked" falsehoods, criticizing Fox for airing the interview at all.
Ironically, US President Joe Biden has confirmed Shokin’s story. At an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in January 2018, Biden boasted about getting Shokin fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan to Kiev.
"I looked [at my watch] and said ‘I’m leaving in six hours, if the prosecutor’s not fired you’re not getting the money. Well son of a b*tch! He got fired, and they put in place someone who was solid," Biden recalled at the CFR event.
Nebojsa Malic, a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator and senior writer at RT, told Radio Sputnik on Monday that Ukraine has been wracked by corruption since it became an independent nation in 1991, amid the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and that Burisma’s recruitment of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, to its board of directors in 2014 was characteristic of the way companies have sought out powerful political “patrons” in such an environment.
“Here's a blatant example, like a confession, so to speak, of essentially withholding aid. These were loan guarantees from the IMF, but in practical terms, this was money from the US taxpayers, in exchange for a political move,” Malic said of Joe Biden’s 2018 admission.
“Now, the big point of disagreement, and you'll hear Biden's defenders say this is that, well, Shokin was fired because he was incompetent and he wasn't actually investigating corruption and he wasn't actually investigating Burisma and Burisma had nothing to do with anything - except Burisma actually hired Hunter Biden as protection, because the man knew nothing about oil and gas exploration, he was there simply because his last name was Biden and his father was in charge of Ukraine policy,” the journalist said. “This is blatantly obvious to even the willfully blind.”
22 August 2023, 03:12 GMT
“And his business partner, Devon Archer, has testified to that effect as well: he literally said ‘they contacted us that they needed some cover.’ I’m not sure he said ‘cover,’ he said something about doing some work in DC to handle the pressure. The exact phrasing doesn't really even matter, it's for the lawyers to deal with. But the issue is that Archer was very forthright, that, you know, the reason Burisma hired Biden is to protect itself from investigations. And Shokin was sniffing around because these guys were owned by a notoriously corrupt oligarch working in a notoriously corrupt country that was even more notoriously corrupt after the coup that the US sponsored in 2014 and put in a new government, thanks to Victoria Nuland, and Biden was invited to ‘midwife’ this thing, in her immortal words. So the notion that there was no corruption and Burisma was clean and that Hunter Biden had nothing to do with anything and he was just a good boy who was on some drugs and got involved with some shady people but knew nothing and did nothing is just ludicrous.”
“And then you have his father confessing that he did exactly what he did. And then you replace Shokin with somebody ‘more solid.’ Here's the issue: I know of the person who replaced Shokin, I had to do a double-take when I read who replaced him because I wasn't paying attention to Ukrainian politics in 2018, but the name sounded familiar. And so I looked it up. And this is the same guy who was advising President Poroshenko, another oligarch, that was put into place by essentially Victoria Nuland, again,” Malic explained.
“Back in 2015, when Ukraine signed the second Minsk agreement after failing to crush Donbass by force again, he said that Ukraine should do the same thing as Croatia 20 years prior: arm itself, get instruction from Americans, and then when the time is right and with American blessing, destroy the separatists in a week. He was referring to the biggest act of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s, which was the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia.”
“This is the man Joe Biden considered ‘solid.’ Solid in what respect, that he's going to do what he's told? As it clearly has nothing to do with his prosecutorial skills or abilities,” the journalist said.
“And sure enough, this guy got replaced by another prosecutor who himself got replaced by another prosecutor. And that particular prosecutor's office is essentially being used to go after Zelensky's political opponents now, so I guess it's going to be considered ‘turbo solid’ in Washington,” Malic said.
'A Corrupt Oligarchy' Since 1991
The journalist explained that due to pro-Western policies that saw Soviet state property “sold off for pennies” in the aftermath of the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine suffered an enormous population loss amid the resulting socioeconomic catastrophe.
“You name it - it's collapsed,” Malic quipped.
“Ukraine is actually a corrupt oligarchy and has been since 1991 or thereabouts. It's a case study of what happens when a post-Soviet country chooses to do what the West told it to do,” he said. “They had a dozen or so oligarchs snap up all of the country's wealth because essentially all of the property of the state was sold off for pennies to speculators like Poroshenko, who ended up owning the biggest candy company in the country.”
He noted that while in Russia, President Vladimir Putin had reined in the power of the oligarchs, much to the chagrin of the West, “in Ukraine, nobody ever purged the oligarchs. They ruled their regions as sort of feudal kingdoms and they came together in support of this post-coup government, with each looking for their own interests. You had these oligarchs bankrolling the neo-Nazi volunteer battalions - the notorious Azov* and even more notorious Aidar** - which were essentially private militias set up by an oligarch who ended up clashing with Poroshenko and being declared persona non grata and fleeing to Israel, where he had citizenship. You had various oligarchs doing oil and gas deals with various American companies, and Burisma was one of them,” Malic explained.
“Just after 2004 - the first Orange Revolution that people have forgotten about - at the time, Western media were bragging about how the West had developed a perfect technique to win other people's elections through a combination of propaganda and demonstrations and essentially soft coups. And of course, they had to scale back that rhetoric after it became obvious what they were doing."
"After 2004, from what I was told by people who live there, things took a turn for the worse. For one brief period under a previous government, they had an experiment in flat taxation and corruption actually subsided because there wasn't enough of a gray area for people to manipulate things. And you had a booming software industry and you had all these video games coming out of Ukraine, and it seemed like they were on the upward swing," Malic said.
"And then in 2004, this coalition of oligarchs comes in and - you know, [Viktor] Yushchenko, [Yulia] Tymoshenko and that crew, and they fell out between themselves over oil and gas, and Tymoshenko herself has been convicted of corruption, although, you know, you never know in Ukrainian courts whether that was legitimate or a political conviction. And that in itself is telling. But that crew just brought the country down into ruin again. And four years later, they get voted out in favor of Yanukovich, the same guy that they forcibly removed in 2014."
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said she is ready to join hands with former president Viktor Yushchenko "for Ukraine's sake," December 11, 2009.
“It's a divided country regionally, and it to some extent even ethnically and linguistically, and a lot of its politics was basically a tug-of-war between regional oligarchs, and the US would every so often go in and put its foot on the scale in favor of certain ones that were loyal to US policies," he noted.
Would-Be Oligarch Buster to Washington Tool
"Now, Zelensky was an exception to this rule because he wasn't an oligarch, he was an actor - an oligarch-sponsored actor. The oligarch who ran him basically bought a TV station and had this TV show produced portraying Zelensky as a president of Ukraine,” Malic explained.
“And then he gets laundered through this show and he gets elected on a peace platform and purging the oligarchs. And, you know, within six months when he goes to the front line, to, talk down these militants into obeying his orders, and he starts yelling, ‘I am the president’ - which, if you have to say you're the president, you're not - and they were basically saying [in response]: ‘if you don't do as we tell you, we’ll kill you.’ And there is this miraculous transformation of Volodymyr Zelensky from peacemaker into another tool of the Washington Establishment practically overnight.”
“Ukraine is a country - it's very sad because I know so many people from there, and they were saying that, you know, essentially ever since the Soviet Union fell apart, they had this whole tug-of-war between oligarchs who would fleece the state and the people and pocket the profits and would essentially bribe their way to wealth. And any time somebody tried to bring law and order to it, they would have a revolution or have them replaced or have them assassinated or accuse them of something else. It's been a really rough country for decades, even before the 2014 coup that set it on the path of war.”
“And so the fact that the first thing that Burisma does after the coup, essentially, is call the son of the sitting US vice president, who's in charge of Ukraine policy - I mean, why would they do this? Hunter Biden had literally just been discharged from the Navy for drug use. He had no useful life skills, he had no connections himself aside from his father. There's literally no other explanation than to get political cover and therefore immunize yourself from investigations of corruption. This is what people do in Eastern Europe: they find a powerful patron. If the local oligarch isn't powerful enough, you seek a foreign sponsor, be that the German embassy, the British Embassy or the Americans.”
*Aidar battalion is an extremist organization banned in Russia.
**Azov battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.
