Key to Trump-Ukraine call: Untangling the alliances
By Tatiana Prophet
editor@back2facts.com
Updated 9/26/2019 6:27 pm
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board in April 2016. It was actually April 2014. Back to Facts regrets the error.
The phone call with new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is meaningless – until you sort through what’s actually going on in Ukraine.
Ukraine has had its ample share of political violence, scandal and even poisoning (see the famous poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution of 2004). With an ideal climate for farming, Ukraine was long the breadbasket of Europe. As such it has been periodically overshadowed and menaced by Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia. To read articles out of context, it appears the political retributions have no end in this country. No wonder they elected an outsider recently, TV personality Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Here is a brief summary of the situation with Joe Biden, best told by the former vice president himself. On January 23, 2018, Biden appeared at an event held by the Council on Foreign Relations. At the event Biden talked about telling the leaders in Ukraine that because the United States deemed the Chief Prosecutor as "corrupt," as the U.S. representative he made the firing of this prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, a condition of providing a loan guarantee from the U.S. for $1 billion. This was in March of 2016. In fact, Shokin by his own account, a just-released affidavit by The Hill’s John Solomon, resigned under pressure from then-President Petro Poroshenko on April 4, 2016. Also by his own account, Shokin was investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Biden’s son Hunter had joined the board in April 2014
However, the removal of Shokin still required a vote from the Ukrainian parliament, which The New York Times reported at the time was "a comfortable margin."
The prosecutor who replaced Shokin was Yuriy Lutsenko, who had been interior minister under embattled former Prime Minister Yulia Timoschenko. Both he and Timoschenko were key figures in the 2004 Orange Revolution. Lutsenko had been jailed and convicted in 2012 on corruption charges, including ordering surveillance on suspects while investigating the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko during his presidential campaign in 2004. Lutsenko was pardoned by the government of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013. Incidentally, on Thursday September 26, 2019, the Washington Post devoted a whole story to Lutsenko’s assertion that Hunter Biden “did not violate anything” in Ukraine. Yet Lutsenko is the guy brought in to replace the guy investigating the board on which the younger Biden sat.
Yanukovych was removed in the pro-EU revolution of 2014 (helped by right-wing paramilitary squads) and replaced by U.S.-friendly Petro Poroshenko, who brought Lutsenko back at Biden's urging. It's true that Shokin had a case open that was investigating energy company Burisma, which ended up paying Joe Biden's son as much as $50,000 a month, according to The New York Times.
Entertainer Volodymyr Zelenskyy, elected in 2019, rode a wave of voter sentiment to return to honesty and the rule of law.
See:
"Clinton Cash" author Peter Schweizer's op ed laying out his evidence on Hunter Biden, Ukraine and China:
The Troubling Reason Why Biden is So Soft on China
