While
working behind the scenes to shape the post-Maidan Ukrainian
government to their liking, powerbrokers in Washington — Biden
included — have done all they could to downplay the U.S. role.
by
Alexander Rubinstein
Part
3 - Continuing corruption after the coup
Ukrainian
media portrayed the meeting with a different tone. A rough
translation of Interfax quotes the then-VP: “Especially in terms
of corruption in Ukraine, he stressed, ‘You are unable to overcome
corruption. The world will not tolerate this, nor can we solve this
problem. You keep stressing that you need help in the energy sector,
but you also have this system completely corrupt.’”
Like his
stance on neo-Nazism, Biden’s stance on corruption seems to change
with the political winds.
As
journalist and lawyer Kevin Zeese recently noted, WikiLeaks
previously reported that Biden “pledged U.S. financial and
technical assistance to Ukraine” for fracking projects. Just
months after Yanukovych was ousted and forced to flee to Russia,
Biden’s son, Hunter, was put on the board of directors of Burisma
Holdings, the largest private gas company in the country.
As the
coup ended, the Washington-backed government eventually took shape
under the auspices of billionaire Petro Poroshenko, who became the
president in June. Biden may have gotten what he wanted — an
ostensible end to corruption in Ukraine’s energy sector. At least
that was the goal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who opened an
investigation into Burisma Holdings.
And so
daddy came to the rescue. Here is Joe Biden, in his own words: “I
got all the good [assignments]. And so I got Ukraine. And I remember
going over, convincing our team, our leaders to — convincing that
we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess,
the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that
there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a
commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take
action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t…I looked at
them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is
not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch —
he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the
time.”
Biden
made those comments at a Council on Foreign Relations event in 2018,
during which he sat on a panel with Michael Carpenter, his former
underling at the White House, who helped egg on the Maidan coup.
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