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US Republican Senator Chuck Grassley revealed on the Senate floor that, according to a largely unredacted version of the FBI’s FD-1023 confidential human source form, a “foreign national” who “bribed Joe and Hunter Biden” has 17 “audio recordings of his conversations with them.” The “foreign national” is allegedly none less than Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian oligarch owner of Burisma, one of the largest private natural gas producers in the country.
The company and its owner have long been the target of investigations and the Biden’s family connections to the Eastern European nation also go way back: in April 2014, Viktor Pshonka, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general, launched a probe into Zlochevsky, over accusations pertaining to tax evasion, and money laundering which was said to have taken place between 2010 and 2012. In April 2014, Burisma’s board of directors named Hunter Biden, son of then US Vice President (and today’s President) Joe Biden, to Burisma’s board as a director; he was said to have earned over $80,000 monthly. This is a very interesting timing, just a couple of months after game-changer events in that nation.
In February 2014, during the so-called Maidan Revolution, then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and fled the country. This 2014 development is described by some experts as a US backed coup to overthrow a “pro-Russian” president.
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs sees this as the beginning of the current Ukrainian crisis, even before the March 2014 Crimean referendum and the Donbass civil war, which started in April of the same year.
The roots of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis go even further back and can be traced to post-independence Kiev’s political elite attempt at “nation-building”, which increasingly took the shape of a rejection all things Russian, thus culminating in the 2014 Maidan, a ultranationalist revolution also backed by Washington. In an attempt to pull Ukraine away from “Russian influence”, the US and the Western powers funded and armed the most radical nationalist and russophobic militias in the nation, even neo-Nazi ones, which later came to be part of the country’s National Guard, a problem which haunts Kiev (and the West) to this day.
Currently, any “pro-Russian” stance is marginalized or even banned in Ukraine (and now also in Poland and increasingly so even in Europe). However, in the Eastern Slavic nation, there had always been a political camp which called for closer cooperation and integration with neighboring Russia rather than with the West – which is hardly surprising, considering that this is a strongly bilingual nation, with a high degree of intermarriage, where at least 34% of the population speaks Russian.
Besides these local and regional frictions, there is a larger geopolitical game at play, pertaining to US-led NATO expansion goals and Washington’s policy of “encircling” and “countering Moscow”, a process which has been described as the main cause of the Ukraine’s crisis 9 years ago, as well as today.
Much has been written about this geopolitical angle, but there is also a geoeconomic dimension to the United States role in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine – one that is less talked about and that goes beyond the notorious profits American weapons manufacturers make.
Regarding Moscow, Washington has a geopolitical rivalry as well as geoeconomic and energy interests, which are often intertwined with private and shady businesses – this could be clearly seen, as I wrote before, in the US campaign to boycott (now gone) Nord Stream 2. Biden’s own special envoy (in 2021), Amos Hochstein, was a former member of Naftogaz’ supervisory board, this being the largest national oil and gas company in Ukraine, also involved in a number of scandals.
Back in August 2021, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament denounced a corruption ring within the aforementioned Naftogaz: his testimony included alleged leaked audio records of then Vice President Biden offering then Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko a billion dollars as part of a secret negotiation to dismiss the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the business activities of his son in the country. These allegations now seem to be confirmed by the recent news about further FBI leaks.
I also wrote on the shady deals involving Ukrainian investment company Dragon Capital and American multinational investment company BlackRock, as well as the evidence implicating the Democrat Party and the Bidens. In many of these episodes, Hunter Biden plays a role: his sexual scandals, the biolabs allegations, and many other accusations have been gaining traction within the US media, and haunting the current American presidency.
Going back to 2014, when Burisma’s board of directors named Hunter Biden, one should keep in mind that during that time, after the deposal of Yanukovych, Washington was happy to work with the new pro-Western government, in whose rise to power it played a role. Other Western institutions such as the European Union, the World Bank, and the IMF were all also willing to work with the new government, although the blatant corruption which plagued the country was a major concern to all of them – and remains so to this day. While his son was acting as a director in Burisma, Joe Biden became Obama’s “point man” in Ukraine and a frequent visitor there, claiming to have flown to the nation at least a dozen times between 2014 and 2016.
Far from being a concern only to the police authorities and prosecutors in both Ukraine and the US (not to mention the tabloids everywhere), the “Ukrainian-American corruption factor” has deep geopolitical and geoeconomic implications. All of the context discussed above indicates that rather than being merely dismissed as “Russian propaganda” or as Republicans trying to “find dirt” on the Democrat rivals, such allegations about Burisma and the Bidens seem to fit a pattern and should be taken seriously.
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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
