Alina Shokina, the daughter of ex-Prosecutor General of Ukraine Viktor Shokin, has said she wants to sue former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden for insulting her family.
Biden, in a recent speech in Washington, D.C., recalled his role in getting Shokin fired from his post in March 2016.
At that time, civil society and Ukraine’s Western partners were alarmed by Shokin’s lack of results as prosecutor general and were demanding his replacement. Biden, during a visit to Kyiv, gave an ultimatum to Ukraine’s authorities, threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee if the disgraced prosecutor wasn’t replaced. Shokin was soon fired and replaced with Yuriy Lutsenko, then a top lawmaker with Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc.
It was Biden’s choice of language that upset Shokin’s daughter.
“I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor isn’t fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden said during a meeting of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 23, provoking laughter from the audience.
Shokina, reportedly a citizen of the United States, felt that Biden’s “son of a bitch” comment offended her father and grandmother. However, she waited for nearly two weeks before taking to Twitter to react.
“I thought about the situation with ex-Vice President Biden’s speech, in which he publicly insulted my father and my late grandmother,” Shokina, who lives in the United States and tweets as @alina_oneworld, posted in Russian on Feb. 4. “Considering that it has to do with my whole family, I’m planning to take to court to protect the honor of my relatives and demonstrate the highest principle of all American citizens’ equality before the law.”
Shokin confirmed the authenticity of the tweets in a comment to Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian online news publication.
“I know that she is going to do that (go to court),” Shokin told Ukrainska Pravda.
Shokin also said he was upset by Biden’s comment. Since March 2017, a year after his firing, Shokin has been suing the state to be reinstated as prosecutor general, claiming he was illegally removed from office, although he has had no success so far. But Biden’s recent comments, according to Shokin, will be used as additional evidence to support his case.
“The fact that he called my late mother a bitch means that nothing is sacred for this man,” Shokin said in a comment to Ukrainian News on Feb. 5. “A normal person that has a mother would never say that.”
