Viktor Mykolayovych Shokin is a former Prosecutor General of Ukraine. Having previously worked as an investigator for the Prosecutor General Office, he served as Prosecutor General for a year between 2015 and 2016.
He was removed from office in March 2016 by a vote in the Ukrainian Parliament following pressure from the European Union, the United States, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Shokin was appointed Prosecutor General of Ukraine on 10 February 2015, replacing Vitaly Yarema. He was a controversial appointee due to his perceived role in blocking prosecutions against those accused of shooting demonstrators in the 2014 Ukrainian revolution. As Prosecutor General, he was accused of blocking major cases against allies and influential figures and hindering the fight against corruption in Ukraine.
Various street protests demanding Shokin's resignation were held.
Through 2015 and early 2016, domestic and international pressure (including from the IMF, the EU, and the EBRD) built for Shokin to be removed from office. The Obama administration withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees to pressure the Ukrainian government to remove Shokin from office. His Deputy Prosecutor, Vitaly Kasko, announced his resignation on 15 February 2016 denouncing the corruption and lawlessness of the Prosecutor's office. Shokin was also criticized in Ukraine for failing to prosecute snipers who killed demonstrators during the revolution, as well as for failing to investigate corrupt businesses.
On 16 February 2016, Shokin submitted a letter of resignation, although the next day an official of the prosecution office stated, "As far as I know he has taken a paid leave". On 19 February 2016 presidential press secretary Sviatoslav Tsegolko wrote on Twitter that the presidential administration had received an official letter of resignation from Shokin.
On 16 March 2016 an official of the prosecution office stated that Shokin had resumed his work. On the same day, his office carried out a raid against one of Ukraine's leading anti-corruption groups, the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC), claiming that it had misappropriated aid money. AntAC was a frequent critic of the Prosecutor General's Office under Shokin. In one notorious case, two of Shokin's prosecutors were caught with stashes of diamonds, cash and valuables in their homes, likely indicating bribery. Prosecutors from another department of Shokin's office were fired or reassigned when they attempted to bring a prosecution against the so-called "diamond prosecutors".
On 28 March, protesters called for Shokin's firing, after his office was authorized by a Kiev court to investigate AntAC. Shokin was formally dismissed in a parliamentary vote on 29 March 2016. The European Union praised Shokin's dismissal due to a "lack of tangible results" of his office's investigations, and also because people in Shokin's office were themselves being investigated.
In 2012, the Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Pshonka began investigating Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the natural gas company Burisma Holdings, over allegations of money laundering, tax evasion, and corruption during 2010–2012.
In 2015, Shokin became the prosecutor general, inheriting the investigation. The Obama administration and other governments and non-governmental organizations soon became concerned that Shokin was not adequately pursuing corruption in Ukraine, was protecting the political elite, and was regarded as "an obstacle to anti-corruption efforts". Among other issues, he was slow-walking the investigation into Zlochevsky and Burisma and, according to Zlochevsky's allies, using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team – to the extent that Obama officials were considering launching their own criminal investigation into the company for possible money laundering.
Shokin claimed in May 2019 that he had been investigating Burisma Holdings. However, Vitaly Kasko, who had been Shokin's deputy overseeing international cooperation before resigning in February 2016 citing corruption in the office, provided documents to Bloomberg News indicating that under Shokin, the investigation into Burisma had been dormant.
The investigation into Burisma only pertained to events happening before Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, joined the board of directors of Burisma Holdings in 2014.
Representatives of the EU and the United States pressed Poroshenko for his removal, as did the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
In March 2016 the Ukrainian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to remove Shokin, a decision which was welcomed by the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_ShokinThat's just the brief overview of how corrupt Viktor Shokin was and is. There is a huge voluminous record of evidence regarding his corruption and connections.
The broad condemnation of Shokin by: Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the U.S. and EU governments, the IMF and World Bank, the anticorruption groups and ordinary citizens of Ukraine, and finally the Ukrainian Parliament was not driven by Joe Biden. Vice-Presidents don't have any political power except to break tie votes in the Senate. Beyond that, Vice-Presidents are simply messengers for official U.S. policy that is decided by others.
The international effort to replace Shokin was driven by a desire to put Ukraine on a path to root out corruption in their country. The desire to make Ukraine less corrupt was to make it more tenable to support the Ukrainian war against Russian invasion. It's much more difficult to justify supporting the war effort of a corrupt government even when the cause, in this case Russian invasion, is justifiable. In addition, there is a strong desire among western democracies to see Ukraine become an acceptably functional democracy as part of the western alliance that opposes Russia's government of corrupt oligarchy rather than a mirror and subservient partner of Russia as the extraordinarily corrupt Russian dominated Ukrainian government was prior to their 2014 revolution.
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