Unfortunately, Ukraine ends up being the big loser in this global attention to the U.S. President Donald J. Trump-instigated scandal over ex-Vice President Joseph Biden. Trump accused of Biden of wanting ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired, which was true. But it’s not true that the reason was that Shokin was investigating Burisma energy company, on whose board son Hunter Biden served for five years. To the contrary, Biden and many others demanded that ex-President Petro Poroshenko fire Shokin precisely because the prosecutor wasn’t seriously investigating any corruption cases — and had sabotaged the Burisma probe. Poroshenko complied to the demands in 2016, but Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, wasn’t any better.
It’s sad that Trump sees fit to exploit a poor country like Ukraine, fighting for its very survival, for his own domestic political purposes. That’s scraping the barrel.
Zelensky is really not helping the narrative herein by still not coming out definitively on the PrivatBank case. While we hear that prosecutors are about to launch indictments against other oligarchs related to similar banking sector problems, there is silence on PrivatBank, which Ukraine nationalized after taxpayers recapitalized it with $5.5 billion because of fraudulent insider lending allegedly done by former co-owner, billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky.
I don’t get what Zelensky does not get about the PrivatBank case. I mean the International Monetary Fund, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and other international financial institutions were all telling Ukraine in the period 2015-2016 that a) PrivatBank was in difficulty; b) it was the largest bank and systemic to the entire system so could drag the whole sector down, and the economy with it; and c) if shareholders could not stump up additional capital in a timely manner, the bank risked failing, and hence the state had to step in. They eventually did.
Meanwhile, on the Biden gig, Zelensky finds himself in an impossible position caught between the Republicans and the Democrats and running afoul of falling afoul of whoever wins the U.S. presidential election in 2020.
Best to remain mum as I think the Ukrainian side has been trying to.
All that said, and whatever the truth specifically on Biden (and my own experience in Ukraine tells me he did exactly the right think on the Shokin situation), it’s sad that Trump and the people in the White House saw fit to try and hold back military assistance to Ukraine, for whatever reason, when the country was/is still fighting for its survival against Russia’s war, now in its sixth year.
I mean I think people are missing the point here….why would Trump threaten to withhold military assistance? Sure I could understand it, if it were U.S. Agency for International Development assistance, where one can make the link to the anti-corruption agenda. But surely it was in the U.S. interest to help the Ukrainians fight aggression from the east, whatever was happening on the anti-corruption front. Ukrainian troops are dying defending NATO and the West against the Russian encroachment in the east. Why would Trump pull military assistance? This was simply idiotic. It shows a total lack of clear thinking in the White House or desperation.
