A new episode of political drama, which may pull Ukraine into the U.S. presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, hit the headlines this week.
The four-year-old recordings, containing what appears to be conversations between ex-Vice President Biden and Ukraine’s ex-President Petro Poroshenko while both were in office, were published this week by Ukrainian associates of Rudy Giuliani with the active participation of Russian influence agents, in an apparent attempt to embarrass the politicians and dent Biden’s presidential run against Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Leaked recordings are a staple in Ukrainian politics. Two decades ago, the so-called “cassette scandal” erupted in Ukraine, when recordings of President Leonid Kuchma’s conversations were published. It eventually led to a geopolitical shift for Ukraine. Pro-Western reformers left power, and the closest entourage of Kuchma was filled by Kremlin supporters like Viktor Medvedchuk, a close friend of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. One of their political slogans was, “Going to Europe — Together with Russia.”
A group by the same name was then created in the Ukrainian parliament and was headed by Andriy Derkach, then a young lawmaker. The Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) even called him “Ukraine’s future Putin.” Derkach is a graduate of the Dzerzhinsky Academy in Moscow, which soon became known as the FSB Academy. His father, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine Leonid Derkach, was among the most influential people in the country in the first decade of Ukraine’s independence.
In 22 years of his political career, Derkach was one of the most persistent lobbyists of the “Russian Choice” and opposed Ukraine’s NATO aspirations. This, however, did not prevent his daughter from moving to California for college.
Twenty years after Kuchma’s cassette scandal, we are again hearing voices from the presidential office. However, they are not discussing ways to neutralize an opposition journalist, as was the case with Kuchma’s tapes. The focus of this conversation is on Ukraine’s obligations to secure U.S. macro-financial assistance. The source leaking the tape is Derkach, who is one of the main supporters of anti-Biden conspiracy theories promoted by Rudy Giuliani, an attorney of Trump.
The group of Ukrainian supporters of Giuliani’s conspiracy includes many colorful characters: Former lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko, who is officially accused in Ukraine of embezzling Hr 1.6 billion (more than $50 million), former lawmaker Andriy Artemenko, who was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship and was charged with fraud as to the sports transfers and misuse of public money disbursed for the TsSKA football club; former diplomat Andriy Telizhenko, who works for Russian oligarch Pavel Fuks, and current member of parliament Oleksandr Dubinsky, who is the mouthpiece of billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky is being investigated by a U.S. federal grand jury for alleged money laundering.
All these people, as well as media outlets and social media groups affiliated with them, shared the Poroshenko-Biden recordings to the maximum extent possible, trying to pose them as a sensation — even though their contents revealed nothing new.
Read also: Ukrainian MP releases Biden-Poroshenko call recordings, spouts absurd conspiracy theory
In the recordings, Biden and Poroshenko discussed Ukraine getting $1 billion loan guarantees from the U.S. in exchange for fulfilling several conditions, including ousting then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin; and talk about people in the Ukrainian government. However, all the facts that these “whistleblowers” presented have long been known to people on both sides of the Atlantic. The only new thing is the recording itself, which Derkach claimed to have received from “investigative journalists” whom he doesn’t name.
Derkach promotes the theory that Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor general in order to stop a case against a Ukrainian company that employed his son, Hunter Biden. For people who don’t live in Ukraine or don’t read past headlines, such a conspiracy theory may seem plausible. However, I have repeatedly pointed out that it’s a fake narrative.
Shokin was an obedient puppet in Poroshenko’s hands. He did not act as an independent fighter against corruption but carried out the will of his friend — the president. I can personally attest that in January 2016, during my last personal meeting with President Poroshenko, he asked me not to publicly criticize several individuals, including Shokin. Poroshenko justified his request by the fact that Shokin was “practically a family member” to him.
Of course, I rejected Poroshenko’s request and continued to expose Shokin, mainly his sabotage of investigations. This is drastically different from the legend that Giuliani, Derkach, and others are making up — that Shokin was supposedly too fierce of an investigator.
Everyone who remembers the Ukrainian politics of those years can describe Shokin as an inactive prosecutor who protected corrupt officials and fired his deputies who couldn’t be controlled. One of the accusations made by the Ukrainians against Shokin was that he failed to conduct a proper investigation into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served. Among those who demanded such an investigation was the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
Biden was the last in line to demand Shokin’s dismissal. Our pro-democracy platform in parliament had collected over 120 signatures for Shokin’s resignation out of the 150 needed to formally initiate the resignation. Besides, a similar call was made many times by civil society representatives and investigative journalists tired of chronic sabotage in the fight against corruption by Shokin.
What is remarkable in this whole story is that the first reaction of the English-language media space to the publication of Derkach recordings came from the media affiliated with Russia. Those were Russia Today, Sputnik (a project of Russia Today), a Russian state news agency TASS, as well as media owned by pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine — Medvedchuk’s TV channel 112 and the agency Ukrainskie Novosti, owned by Medvedchuk’s associate Serhiy Lyovochkin. Their interpretation of the event was consistent with that of One America News Network, which was involved in spreading Giuliani’s fake conspiracy theory.
The pseudo-sensation published by Derkach is a logical follow-up of another extraordinary event. Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a former lawmaker and one of Yulia Tymoshenko’s sponsors, gave an interview from the German prison. He ended up there at the request of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, which investigates his alleged embezzlement at a state-owned gas company. To communicate with the outside world, Onyshchenko decided to choose not Ukrainian journalists but the Russian TV channel NTV, which is part of Putin’s propaganda network.
There, Onyshchenko mixed truth and fiction, and sometimes merely lied — doing so in line with the Russian propaganda. He, like Derkach at his press conference on May 20, repeated fake information that the $1 billion received by Ukraine in exchange for the dismissal of Shokin was spent to finance the war in the Donbas.
This interpretation of events is advantageous for Russia, but is far from reality, because the U.S. did not allocate the money, but rather provided guarantees for Ukraine to place bonds on the world markets at a low-interest rate, which corresponds to the U.S. credit rating, and the funds raised were used for Ukraine’s needs.
Onyshchenko also tried to include himself in the context of the American elections, saying (with the help of the Russian TV channel) that he was arrested in Germany right before his flight to the U.S., where he was going to give “testimony” to Giuliani.
According to a Russian TV presenter, Onyshchenko’s goal was to deliver a “big speech in Washington.” “Trump’s side has an ace up its sleeve: Oleksandr Onyshchenko and his incriminating evidence,” the story said.
While on Russian TV, Onyshchenko also added fuel to yet another of Giuliani’s conspiracy theories that “George Soros controls everything in Ukrainian politics.”
Like Derkach, Onyshchenko also has clear ties to Russia — to avoid extradition to Ukraine, he hired a new top lawyer, a former Bundestag member, Peter Gauweiler, who is friends with Sergei Naryshkin (director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, former head of the Russian presidential administration, and former Duma speaker). This German politician has also visited Russia after the sanctions were imposed and even tried to visit Crimea, legalizing the annexation of the peninsula.
The whole story with the Biden-Poroshenko records is an attempt to pull Ukraine into the U.S. political fray, using disinformation as the main tool. It is also used to clear Russia of responsibility for interfering in the U.S. 2016 presidential election and to repeat the same move using agents of Russian influence in Ukraine’s politics.
At the latest press conference, President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on an investigation into the leaked audio recordings. For Ukraine, including the president, it is important not to get involved in someone else’s scenario, especially a scenario directed by Russia’s agents. We must find a way to avoid the role of a football that American candidates will be passing on to each other. Last fall, amid the U.S. impeachment inquiry, this was achieved. Now is another challenge for the Ukrainian authorities to show their neutrality and maintain bipartisan support for Ukraine in the U.S.
