The public transcripts of witness testimonies in the U.S. House impeachment inquiry make for more than riveting reading. They reveal a lot about Ukraine-U.S. relations, the corruption that infects both countries and efforts to stop it.
While U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s actions show that he got in bed with a motley collection of Ukraine’s corruptionists, the American democratic institutions are not dead yet — and are fighting back.
It’s hard to imagine Ukraine’s parliament conducting such an extensive inquiry into its own corruption. But it should.
My Sunday, Nov. 10, reading focused on the 355-page transcript of U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, who oversees six nations including Ukraine, and who served as deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine from 2015-2018. A career foreign service officer, he’s spent time in many nations. He distinguished himself in Kyiv for his easygoing manner and sharp attire that favored bow ties.
He should find an editor, polish and expand on his transcript, and publish it as a book. I tried to boil it down, but still wound up with 46 pages of notes.
I focused on the passages related to Ukraine’s two massively corrupt and ineffective former prosecutors general, Viktor Shokin, who served from 2015-2016, and Yuriy Lutsenko, who served from 2016-2019. They were both appointees of ex-President Petro Poroshenko.
The third is the corrupt and ineffective Nazar Kholodnytsky, who inexplicably still leads the semi-independent Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office after his appointment to the post in 2015 by Shokin.
None of the three fought corruption. Instead, they leveraged their ties to Poroshenko and protected corruption, exposing the ex-president for the fraud he was as a reformer — a key reason why voters threw out Poroshenko on April 21 in a landslide defeat to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Eventually, the U.S. government gave up on all three of them because of their corruption and cut off U.S. capacity-building assistance to their offices because they refused to carry out reforms.
The three prosecutors retaliated by helping smear U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie L. Yovanovitch, convincing Trump to abruptly recall her on April 26 of this year. The conduit for their smear campaign was Rudy Guiliani, the U.S. president’s personal lawyer, and his now-indicted associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.
With Lutsenko, the breaking point for the U.S. government was his 2017 exposure of undercover officers investigating a scheme by state migration service workers to sell fraudulent biometric passports.
With Shokin, the final straw was his protection of the corrupt “diamond prosecutors” in 2015.
Kholodnytsky, meanwhile, lost U.S. confidence after recordings showed him sabotaging criminal cases and obstructing justice in 2018.
Here’s a round-up of Kent’s testimony involving some of the main characters in the plot:
Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin spoke at a press conference in Kyiv on Nov. 2, 2015. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Viktor Shokin
Known to have been the godfather of Poroshenko’s kids, “there was a broad-based consensus that he was a typical Ukraine prosecutor who lived a lifestyle far in excess of his government salary, who never prosecuted anybody known for having committed a crime, and having covered up crimes that were known to have been committed,” Kent said.
The U.S. position that “under no circumstances” should Shokin receive a visa to the United States led to a clash with Guiliani, who in early 2019 lobbied the White House to reverse the denial of Shokin’s visa applications.
“Shokin wanted to come to the United States to share information suggesting that there was corruption at the U.S. Embassy,” Kent said. “Knowing Mr. Shokin, I had full faith that it was a bunch of hooey, and he was looking to basically engage in a con game out of revenge because he’d lost his job.”
Giuliani’s involvement prompted a phone call from Robert Blair, a top adviser to acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who must have been satisfied with the explanation received from Kent and then-U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell.
“Mr. Shokin, to the best of my knowledge, did not ever receive a visa and has not come to the U.S.,” Kent said.
Poroshenko paid a political price for his backing of Shokin. After the “diamond prosecutors” scandal erupted, Poroshenko took a dive in the polls — dropping to the mid-20s in public approval from a high of 55 percent, Kent said. And Poroshenko never recovered.
The case that involved prosecutors – Oleksandr Korniyets, a former Shokin driver, and Volodymyr Shapakin – suspected of taking a $117,000 bribe. Prosecutors say they recovered an unspecified number of diamonds after a raid on the suspects’ offices and homes. Kent said Shokin retaliated in a bid to “destroy and remove from office anyone associated” with the investigation.
General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko speaks at a press briefing at his office on March 7, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Yuriy Lutsenko
“When Shokin was forced out, the intent of then-President Poroshenko was to appoint someone he trusted. Yuriy Lutsenko was also the godfather of his kids. And the question was whether someone who didn’t have a law degree could be a reliable partner to try to reform the prosecutorial service. So I had a series of meetings with him in the spring of 2015 to judge and assess whether he would be a serious partner for us. And so, that was the initial, if you will, renewal of a relationship,” Kent said.
“Subsequent to that time, it was very clear that Mr. Lutsenko was not any more serious about reforming the corrupt prosecutorial service than Viktor Shokin had been,” Kent said. “And at that point, our relationship not personal to me, but the relationship between the embassy and Mr. Lutsenko began to sour.”
Q: So it was the embassy and the U.S. view that Mr. Lutsenko was another corrupt prosecutor general?
Kent: “That was our assessment, yes.”
Lutsenko fought back ferociously, however, flying to New York for a private meeting with Giuliani in January and giving interviews to The Hill’s John Solomon, for stories published in March, in which he lied about everything — including his bogus claim, since retracted, that the U.S. Embassy gave him a list of Ukrainians he should not prosecute.
Kent said The Hill’s articles were amplified in Ukraine by “Porokhobots, trolls on the internet, particularly Facebook, in support of then-President Poroshenko and against the people that are perceived to be Poroshenko’s opponents.”
Besides attacking Yovanovitch, Lutsenko “was looking to destroy” the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, led by Artem Sytnyk, Kent said, because NABU — as the agency is known — was starting to be effective in fighting crime and corruption.
On March 19, 2019, Kent got word from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv that Gizo Uglava, NABU’s deputy director, reported a conversation the night before “with a completely inebriated, drunk, Yuriy Lutsenko, and Lutsenko was angry. He said he’d given an interview with an American journalist to weeks prior and that interview that he had accused the embassy of undermining him, and that was his motivation, and that the embassy had been supportive of the Democratic Party, and was not supportive of the Trump party and that so basically the lines of attack that then came out in the subsequent articles.”
Kent said “the breaking point of our disillusionment with Yuriy Lutsenko came in late 2017 when he colluded with corrupt state officials selling fake biometric passports by sabotaging a NABU investigation.
“When we searched the database, it turned out that a number of the passports that had been issued as part of these schemes had gone to individuals who had applied for U.S. visas,” Kent said. “So we were very angry and upset because this threatened our security, and it potentially also threatened their ability to retain the visa-free status in the European Union.”
Lutsenko aligned so well with Trump-Guiliani interests that even Donald Trump Jr. attacked Yovanovitch in a tweet retweeted by Lutsenko’s spokeswoman.
Lutsenko’s aim, he said, appeared to be to get Trump to endorse Poroshenko’s re-election bid so that he could hold on to his job.
In the run-up to the election, the “Porokhobots,” the trolls on social media who were active in support of Poroshenko, “were attacking Ambassador Yovanovitch and me by name” rather than Russia or his political opponents.
Nazar Kholodnytsky at the meeting of the National Council for Anti-Corruption Policy on July 18, 2019, in Kyiv. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Nazar Kholodnytsky
Appointed in late 2015 by Shokin to head up the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Office, the U.S. Embassy considered Nazar Kholodnytsky “the weakest of the three final candidates to become the special anti-corruption prosecutor,” Kent said.
But still the government worked with him, sending him on intensive training trips to the United States, to Romania to learn under noted anti-corruption prosecutor Laura Kovesi and embedding FBI agents as mentors in his office.
After suspicions developed against him, an investigation recorded him in his office coaching witnesses to lie and obstructing justice in a criminal case. Before the news went public, the embassy called him in and asked him “to resign quietly.” Instead, “he stood up, walked out, and tweeted, before he left the embassy compound that he was going to have a defiant attitude.”
Finally, on March 5, 2019, Yovanovitch — in a landmark speech delivered at the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center — called for the firing of Kholodnytsky.
Former ecology minister of Ukraine Mykola Zlochevsky. (Courtesy)
‘$7 million bribe’ in Burisma
Kent testified that the initial sabotage of the Burisma corruption case took place during the time when Vitaly Yarema, Shokin’s predecessor, was in power.
Burisma is a large private energy company owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a minister of ecology under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. As minister, he approved lucrative oil and gas permits to Burisma, a textbook definition of corruption. Burisma tried many ways to escape criminal prosecution, including stacking its board of directors with such influential people as ex-Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski and Hunter Biden, the son of ex-U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.
“In late December 2014, somebody in the prosecutor general’s office of Ukraine — this is, to be clear, pre-Lutsenko, pre-Shokin — a different corrupt, ineffective prosecutor who inexplicably had shut the criminal case that had been the basis for a British court to freeze $23 million in assets held by Mykola Zlochevsky,” Kent said.
On Feb. 3, 2015, Kent met with deputy prosecutor general Anatoly Danylenko.
Kent asked: “How much was the bribe and who took it?”
And Danylenko “laughed and said, ha ha ha ha, that’s what President Poroshenko asked us last week.”
Kent: “And what did you tell him?”
“$7 million, and it happened before our team came in May of 2014.”
That, Kent told him, was untrue. The sabotage of the case happened on Yarema’s watch, with a letter on Dec. 25, 2014, to British authorities saying there is no criminal case against Zlochevsky, prompting Great Britain to unfreeze $23 million.
Danylenko told Kent: “I’ve been friends with Zlochevsky for 21 years, and he’s in Dubai right now.”
Kent told him to arrest Zlochevsky the next time that he returns to Ukraine.
Zlochevsky has since returned to Ukraine, where a review of the criminal cases against him is under way by current Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka.
Ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk gives a speech at the Narodnyi Front political party convention on Feb. 2, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Arseniy Yatsenyuk
The prime minister was forced out in 2016 by Poroshenko. But before then, the U.S. Embassy applied successful pressure to get Mykola Martynenko, a backer of Arseniy Yatsenyuk, to resign from parliament.
“There was a similar push against Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, who had several different corrupt political backers,” Kent said. “And there was one named Martynenko who was involved in all sorts of dirty business, including nuclear fuel supplies from Russia. And so we pressured Yatsenyuk to have one of his corrupt cronies resign, and Martynenko resigned.”
Moral outrage
There were plenty of crimes for prosecutors to solve, Kent said, but they refused.
“When, in a country whose leading journalist was murdered on the orders of a president (Leonid Kuchma( in 2000, when journalists are attacked, when an anti-corruption activist has acid thrown in her face at the orders of people that were politically connected and after 12 operations she died, yes, we raised specific cases of concern regarding the misuse of state office to go after civil society activists, members of the media and members of the opposition,” Kent said. “In the year before President Poroshenko ran for reelection, there were over 100 such attacks against civil society, the media, and occasionally political opponents. None of those were prosecuted by Yuriy Lutsenko.”
More corruption ahead?
Kent concluded that “it is accurate to say that Ukraine has a serious problem with corruption, and the U.S. is committed, where there’s a political will, to work with Ukrainians, inside and outside government to make changes. But absent that political will, this will be a problem that will stick with Ukraine and stick with the U.S.-Ukraine relationship.”
The two agencies most in need of reforming at the General Prosecutor’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB. Both were tools of Soviet repression, he said, and both remain largely unreformed in many former Soviet republics 28 years later.
Memorable quotes
One of the quotes that may live in infamy is Kent’s characterization, widely supported, of how Ukraine’s oligarchs got wealthy after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
“If you took the roster of the richest Ukrainians, they didn’t build value, they largely stole it,” Kent said. “So we could go down the richest 20 Ukrainians and have a long conversation about the structure of the Ukrainian economy, and certainly most of the billionaires in the country became billionaires because they acquired state assets for largely undervalued prices and engaged in predatory competition.”
Another of his memorable quotes was that Trump only wanted to hear three words publicly from Zelensky: “Investigations, Biden, Clinton.”
Former U.S. Special Envoy for Ukraine, Kurt Volker walks away after attending a closed-door hearing for the second time at the U.S. Capitol Oct. 16, 2019, in Washington, DC. (AFP)
Kurt Volker
It wasn’t only Ukraine’s corrupt prosecutors or politicians who drew criticism from Kent. He also faulted Kurt Volker, the ex-U.S. envoy to Ukraine, for doing Guiliani’s bidding in trying to get Zelensky to investigate Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton and the Bidens, Joseph and son Hunter, involving Burisma.
Kent said he took Volker to task for working with Giuliani and trying to pressure the Ukrainians into investigating the Bidens and whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election against Trump.
“And Kurt’s reaction, or response to me was that: ‘Well, if there’s nothing there, what does it matter? And if there is something there, it should be investigated.’ My response to him was asking another country to investigate a prosecution for political reasons undermines our advocacy of the rule of law.
“What I know is that by September, Kurt was actively promoting the request for Ukraine to open these investigations,” Kent said.
Volker pushed so much so that, in a September meeting with Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff Andriy Yermak and U.S. Ambassador William B. Taylor, the Ukrainian pushed back when Volker warned him not to investigate Poroshenko’s wrongdoing.
“What? You mean the type of investigations you’re pushing for us to do on Biden and CIinton?” Yermak countered.
When the conversation turned to a possible Zelensky-Trump meeting in the White House, Volker reminded Yermak that the Ukrainian president needed to announce the investigations into the Bidens and the 2016 presidential election interference in favor of Clinton.
But Taylor contradicted Volker, telling Yermak: “Don’t do that.”
The meeting took place during the Sept. 12-14 annual Yalta European Strategy conference at which, if everything went well, Zelensky would announce the investigations exclusively to Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host who is hired by billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk to moderate some of the panels.
The interview never happened. The announcement was never made.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, acting on a whistleblower’s complaint about the notorious July 25 phone call between Trump and Zelensky in which Trump pressed his counterpart to dig up dirt on his political rivals, announced the start of an impeachment inquiry on Sept. 24. Volker resigned three days later.
Live televised public hearings start on Nov. 13.
