6th October, 2019
Four days before U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated in Jan. 2017, the then outgoing vice president, Joe Biden, was in Ukraine – his sixth visit in seven years – to deliver a rousing farewell speech.
“You’re fighting both against the cancer of corruption, which continues to eat away at Ukraine’s democracy within, and the unrelenting aggression of the Kremlin,” he told local leaders, politicians and parliamentarians in Kiev, the capital.
“It’s imperative that you continue to strengthen all of your anti-corruption institutions to root out those who would return Ukraine to rule by cronyism and kleptocracy,” he added.
The rousing speech reflected not only Biden’s focus on driving out entrenched corruption in Ukraine, but also the Obama White House efforts to help the former Soviet republic on its difficult path to democracy.
Trump has now turned that on its head, arguing that it was Biden and his son, Hunter, who were corrupt – although no evidence has emerged to indicate that.
The dispute is at the centre of the impeachment inquiry raging in Washington.
House Democrats say Trump abused his office when he pressed Ukraine’s president to investigate Biden and, thus, interfere in an American political campaign. Trump says he acted appropriately to root out corruption, wherever it appears.
Biden’s interest in the region goes back to his first term in the Senate in the 1970s.
He focused on European affairs, and after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he directed attention to former Soviet states including Ukraine, arguing they be allowed to join NATO and given economic and military support.
After Russian troops seized and occupied the Crimean peninsula in the spring of 2014 – the first post-Cold War territorial takeover by Moscow – Ukraine rose to the top of the Obama administration agenda. Obama essentially outsourced the portfolio to his vice president – a task, by most accounts, Biden enthusiastically embraced.
“Ukraine was the top, or one of the top three, foreign policy issues we were concentrating on,” said Mike Carpenter, Biden’s foreign policy and defence policy adviser at the time. “He was front and centre.”
On one trip, in February 2014, Biden watched anti-government protesters fill the streets of Kiev in what became known as the Maidan revolution.
Within months, the pro-Russian government was ousted and replaced with pro-Western leaders.
Former aides described Biden’s work after that as a kind of “marriage counselling,” getting the newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, to cooperate with the prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a political rival.
Known for his bluntness, Biden warned them that Ukraine could not be seen as a “basket case” or allies would lose patience.
“And then you’d be screwed and left at the mercy of Moscow,” a former aide recalled Biden telling the men.
Ukrainians say Biden’s most important contribution was showing that Washington would support Ukraine as it struggled to remain independent of Russia.
“Vice President Biden stood up strongly for Ukraine, and many of my fellow Ukrainians were very grateful,” said Danylo Lubkivsky, a former deputy foreign minister.
“The important thing is that the support that Biden represented was bipartisan,” he added.