DISINFO: Joe Biden was personally profiteering in Ukraine
SUMMARY
Joe Biden was personally profiteering in Ukraine. Not only his son, Hunter Biden, who has fictitiously worked for Burisma company in Ukraine receiving enormous amounts of money for nothing, but also Biden himself [got] a million dollars for his family for consultations. The purpose of this consultation was actually to pressure then-president Poroshenko so that he would fire the prosecutor-general Victor Shokin, who was investigating the corruption of the Biden family – the father Joe and son Hunter, who were unlawfully helping themselves in Ukraine. For the firing of inconvenient Shokin, the US vice president promised Poroshenko one billion dollars which could be used by Poroshenko’s companies that received military contracts. […] It is a story of international corruption and high treason.
RESPONSE
This is a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. The disinformation message appeared after the leak of the audio tapes containing edited fragments of a conversation between former US Vice President Joe Biden and former president of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. There is no basis for the claims that Joe Biden personally profited in Ukraine. As a former US vice president, he was responsible for US policy towards Ukraine. Extensive journalistic investigations by multiple international media outlets reveal that Ukraine faced broad international and domestic pressure to advance anti-corruption reforms and that Ukraine's international partners were concerned about Ukraine's prosecutor-general at the time, who was reputed to not follow up on corruption issues. See relevant reporting by the Financial Times, RFERL, and Washington Post among others. In 2018, Joe Biden himself publicly spoke about conversations with President Poroshenko regarding Ukraine's prosecutor-general. The mentioned sum of one billion dollars was not a personal payment, but rather the amount of US loan guarantees to Ukraine. There is no evidence to support the claims that international corruption or high treason occurred in this case. Hunter Biden served on the board of one of the largest natural gas companies in Ukraine. Hostility towards the Biden family has been a consistent feature of pro-Kremlin disinformation. See other examples, such as false allegations of Hunter's "dubious" business in Kyiv, Joe Biden's vow to prevent Vladimir Putin's reelection, his rule over Ukraine, and his intimate involvement in the war in Donbas and in Georgian unrest.