What do we know about the involvement of Joe Biden and his son Hunter in Ukrainian affairs?

As a US senator, Joe Biden has cultivated an interest in European affairs and, more specifically, in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Between 2001 and 2009 he served three times as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

As vice president between 2009 and 2017, Biden visited Ukraine six times, sometimes making a brief stop on a larger tour of Europe or the United States' strategic allies in Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. The Obama administration saw Ukraine, together with the Republic of Georgia, as the two keystone states in the region; both also experienced Russian aggression. To Ukrainian politicians and the public at large, Biden's frequent visits symbolized American commitment to building a strong, independent Ukraine free of corruption and rule by cronyism. During one trip to Ukraine, in February 2014, Biden witnessed the revolution on the Maidan en­tering its crucial stage. All of this made him popular with patriotic Ukrainians, who realized nonetheless that their fight for freedom enjoyed bipartisan support in the United States. The late Republican senator John McCain also visited often and spoke even more strongly in support of the EuroMaidan; there is now a street in the Ukrainian capital named after him.

Because Ukraine had developed by the early 2000s into a klep­tocracy, a thoroughly corrupt state with most public servants at all levels involved in various embezzlement schemes, Western support of Ukraine had to take unorthodox forms. The United States and its allies often found themselves supporting Ukrainian civil society against its own corrupt political class. As explained elsewhere in this book, Ukraine's Western partners routinely had to force the Ukrainian political elites into accepting important reforms by making them a condition for receiving a major loan from the IMF or visa-free travel to the European Union.

In this context, Biden's micro-management of Ukrainian politics was nothing out of the ordinary. When an independent Ukrainian parliamentarian with KGB and Russian connections released to the public in May 2020 audio clips from 2015 and 2016, purported to be from Biden's (and then Secretary of State John Kerry's) phone calls with President Poroshenko, there was nothing there even close to the "favor" Trump asked of Zelensky in July. What stood out in these tapes was how closely the United States was involved in forcing the various Ukrainian reformist parties to work together, as well as in pushing through major anti-corruption measures. Although the tapes confirm the well-known story of Biden making US$1 billion in American loan guarantees conditional on the removal of the then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in 2016, Biden never denied this and, in fact, spoke repeatedly of this episode.

Although Poroshenko saw Shokin as a reliable ally, the Ukrainian public disagreed, giving him a stunning negative rating of 73.2 per­cent in a February 2016 poll.¹³ By then, the US ambassador, EU rep­resentatives, the IMF, and leading Ukrainian anti-corruption groups denounced Shokin for blocking decisive anti-corruption measures and the much-needed reform of the prosecution system. His own deputy resigned because of the alleged corruption and politicking in the Prosecutor General's Office. Biden's 2016 ultimatum to Poroshenko was thus completely in line with the opinion of Western diplomats and the Ukrainian public.

Until Trump raised this issue in his phone call with Zelensky in July 2019, the Ukrainian public knew nothing about Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian connection. After Trump and Giuliani suggested that Shokin's ouster had been motivated by his investigation of the Burisma gas company that had employed Biden's son, Hunter, as a board member, this matter became widely discussed in Ukraine— and investigated by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau. A large natural gas company owned by an oligarch associated with the Yanukovych regime, Burisma was vulnerable after the EuroMaidan. While serving as minister of the environment before 2012, its oli­garch owner issued exploration and extraction permits to his own gas company. In April 2014 Burisma hired the American lobbyist and investment advisor Hunter Biden to serve on its board as a spe­cialist on corporate governance. Of course, this lucrative job, which included a salary of up to US$50,000 per month and none too on­erous duties, had everything to do with his family name. Nepotism is an important part of post-Soviet business culture, but it is difficult to imagine a large Ukrainian company run by people so naive as to believe that they could buy the “protection” of a US vice president this way. The more likely reason was a kind of name-dropping in­tended to make enemies think twice before going after a company for which the son of a US vice president considered it appropriate to work. At the same time, the company also hired the former pres­ident of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski. In other words, Burisma

was trying to create the image of a “clean” and well-connected com­pany rather than buying actual immunity from prosecution.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau confirmed that at some point Burisma had indeed been investigated by the Prosecutor General's Office, but the investigation concerned the company's actions between 2010 and 2012, well before Hunter Biden came on board. It was also dormant in 2016, when Joe Biden pushed for Shokin's ouster. Neither in 2016 nor later did the Ukrainian authorities document any wrongdoing on the part of Hunter Biden. After Trump and Giuliani put forward their own version of events, Shokin tried to return from political oblivion by claiming that his dismissal had been connected to the investigation of Burisma, but no documents or recordings have surfaced in support of this inter­pretation. The sensational release of the “Biden Tapes" in Ukraine in May 2020 ultimately flopped because nothing in the clips posted on the Internet supported the conspiratorial version that Trump and Giuliani promoted.