(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Not for the first time, Ukraine has found itself at the center of an American political scandal. News reports say that President Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig up dirt on his potential election rival, Joe Biden. Trump says the problem is Biden, who shut down a Ukrainian investigation into his son when he was vice president.
My advice: Don’t believe that Ukrainian officials ever did – or will do – the Americans’ bidding in such a politically charged situation. Corruption investigations tend to get nowhere in Europe’s second-most-corrupt country (after Russia). And if there’s one thing Ukrainian leaders understand, it’s that they can’t afford to take sides in U.S. politics.
Trump tweeted early Monday morning that Biden “forced a tough prosecutor out from investigating his son’s company by threat of not giving big dollars to Ukraine.” Trump’s “real story” contradicts the known facts. And even if Zelenskiy wanted to help the U.S. president advance his theory, he couldn’t credibly do it.
Let’s start with some history. In April 2014, the then-vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, became a generously paid board member of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by former Ukrainian Environment Minister Mykola Zlochevskiy. The same month, the U.K. opened a money laundering investigation into Zlochevskiy’s business and froze Burisma’s accounts.
On Aug. 5, 2014, Ukrainian prosecutors, then under Prosecutor General Vitaliy Yarema, initiated an illicit enrichment and money laundering investigation into Zlochevskiy. Their actual motivation might have been to help Zlochevskiy unfreeze accounts in the U.K. In any case, they failed to present any evidence of ill-gotten gains to U.K. investigators, who were thus unable to keep the funds frozen.
Viktor Shokin, the “tough prosecutor” mentioned in Trump’s tweet, took over as Ukraine’s prosecutor general on Feb. 10, 2015. From then until his firing on April 3, 2016, he did nothing to advance the case against Zlochevskiy. Although Joe Biden has boasted of getting Shokin ousted, the prosecutor had plenty of enemies, including Ukrainian activists, European governments and some of his own underlings. Also, the dismissal gave then-President Petro Poroshenko the opportunity to replace Shokin with a close ally, Yury Lutsenko.
Under Lutsenko, the state forced Zlochevskiy to pay some back taxes and closed the Burisma case – an outcome that Transparency International has portrayed as a sweet deal for Zlochevsky. The investigation was apparently reopened at some point in late 2018 or 2019, but Zlochevskiy wasn’t charged. Lutsenko has said there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.
By rights, Ukraine should reinvestigate the Zlochevskiy case to determine whether he got off easy and what roles at least three prosecutors general – Yarema, Shokin and Lutsenko – might have played. But it’s hard to see how this would turn up dirt on the Bidens. The alleged money laundering would have occurred before Hunter Biden joined Burisma. Whatever role the senior Biden played in getting Shokin fired, it was tangential to an investigation that appears to have been intentionally slow and ineffective at every stage.
Moreover, Zelenskiy must recognize a fundamental rule for Ukrainian leaders dealing with the U.S.: Never antagonize anyone who might become president.
Consider how Zelenskiy’s predecessor, Poroshenko, handled himself. With the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election uncertain, he had to tread carefully. This of course meant he wouldn’t go after the Bidens. But it also required caution regarding Trump’s people with Ukrainian connections.
Under Poroshenko, Ukraine never conducted a proper investigation into the Kyiv business of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and never charged him despite finding evidence that he’d been paid tax-free to work on Ukrainian political campaigns. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau revealed that Manafort’s name was next to some payments recorded in the secret books of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, but didn’t look further into those records, saying it didn’t have jurisdiction since Manafort was not a Ukrainian government official.
Zelenskiy, for all his ambition of draining the Poroshenko swamp, is in a similar predicament. Reopening the Zlochevskiy case will only serve to disappoint Trump if, as seems to be the case, the Bidens cannot be credibly accused of any wrongdoing. And it will anger U.S. Democrats, because any investigation will generate unfavorable noise about their top candidate.
So, just as his predecessor did, Zelenskiy will drag his feet. When he meets with Trump this week, he can’t very well tell the Americans to mind their own politics. But he can, and will, remind them that they’ve been backing Ukraine to contain the aggression of a geopolitical rival, Russia, and not so they could turn the country into an unlikely offshore hub for opposition research.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Whitehouse at mwhitehouse1@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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