In 2014 when Russia annexed the Crimea and went on to back Russian separatists in the Ukraine’s east, then Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. pressed President Barack Obama to take action, and fast, to make Moscow “pay in blood and money” for its aggression. Fortunately President Obama , a Biden aide told the New York Times, was having none of it.
Biden continued to press to increase lethal aid, backing a push to ship FGM-148 Javelin
anti-tank missiles to Kiev. The
president flatly rejected the idea and dispatched Biden to the region as an
emissary, cautioning him “about not overpromising to the Ukrainian government,” Biden wrote in a memoir.
Biden began pressing the Ukraine’s leaders to tackle the
rampant corruption that made their country a risky bet for international
lenders — and pushing reform of Ukraine’s cronyism-ridden energy industry. “You
have to be whiter than snow, or the whole world will abandon you,” Mr. Biden
told the country’s newly elected president, Petro O. Poroshenko, during an
early 2014 phone call, according to a New York Times article.
Just as these efforts were happening Biden’s son Hunter
joined the board of a Ukrainian gas company that was the subject of multiple
corruption investigations, a position that paid him as much as $50,000 a month which
in the view of some Obama administration officials, including the ambassador to
Kiev — threatened to undermine Mr. Biden’s agenda.
A look back at what the former vice president actually did
in Ukraine reveals that his work in Ukraine did not accomplish much nor did it “fundamentally change the overall
institutional corruption,” said Edward C. Chow, an expert on geopolitics and
energy policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a
nonpartisan Washington think tank. “And having his son doing what he did was a
distraction that undermined his message.”
In 2015 Biden, while he was pushing for stronger
anti-corruption moves in Ukraine, would not even discuss steps that could make
all questions vanish: asking his son to quit the Burisma board, as editorial
boards and Ukraine experts were suggesting.
And this is the guy, the one who failed miserably in the region
and still has his son’s suspicious involvement there in his shadow, who we
have at the helm during a crisis that could push the country into a war with
Russia over the Ukraine.
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