Trump and his allies, including his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, accuse Biden of using his position as vice president and point man on relations with Kyiv in 2016 to help Burisma -- a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Biden's son Hunter, who was on its board of directors -- avoid damage from a criminal investigation.
They assert that Shokin was overseeing an active criminal investigation into Burisma and that Biden at the time told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the United States would withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless Shokin was fired.
But Ukrainian prosecutors and anti-corruption activists with knowledge of the matter argue that the timeline of developments in the Burisma case and Shokin's stint as chief prosecutor simply does not fit the narrative being put forward by Trump and his allies.
Moreover, they say that Shokin himself was the biggest obstacle standing in the way of the investigation.
Biden did demand that Shokin be removed. At an
event at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2018, Biden seemed to boast about it, saying that during a visit to Kyiv -- likely in December 2015 -- he told Ukrainian officials: "We're leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money."
However, there are two big problems with the narrative presented by Trump and Giuliani, according to activists in Ukraine and others.
For one thing, Ukrainian prosecutors and anti-corruption advocates who were pushing for an investigation into the dealings of Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevskiy, said the probe had been dormant long before Biden leveled his demand.
"There was no pressure from anyone from the United States" to close the case against Zlochevskiy, Vitaliy Kasko, who was a deputy prosecutor-general under Shokin and is now first deputy prosecutor-general, told
Bloomberg News in May. "It was shelved by Ukrainian prosecutors in 2014 and through 2015," he added.
Activists say the case had been sabotaged by Shokin himself. As an example, they say two months before Hunter Biden joined Burisma's board, British authorities had requested information from Shokin's office as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering by Zlochevskiy. Shokin ignored them.
Kaleniuk and AntAC published a detailed timeline of events surrounding the Burisma case, an outline of evidence suggesting that three consecutive chief prosecutors of Ukraine -- first Shokin’s predecessor, then Shokin, and then his successor -- worked to bury it.
"Ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to leave because the prosecutor failed [to pursue] the Burisma investigation, not because Shokin was tough and active with this case," Kaleniuk said.
Ukrainian prosecutors have described no evidence indicating that Biden sought to help his son by getting Shokin dismissed -- and have suggested that they have not discovered any such evidence.
But there is a long list of Western organizations, governments, and diplomats, as well as Ukrainian anti-corruption groups, that wanted to see Shokin fired.
They include the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the U.S. government, foreign investors, and Ukrainian advocates of reform.
In a column published days after Shokin was fired in March 2016, Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the
Atlantic Council think tank in Washington
, wrote that his dismissal came as no surprise.
"The amazing thing is not that he was sacked but that it has taken so long," Aslund said. "Petro Poroshenko appointed Shokin to the role in February 2015. From the outset, he stood out by causing great damage even to Ukraine's substandard legal system."
U.S. President Donald Trump asserts that Joe Biden pushed for the ouster of Ukraine’s chief prosecutor to quash a probe into a Burisma, a gas company with Biden's son on its board. Officials and anti-corruption activists in Kyiv say Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin had shelved the case long...
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