Viktor Shokin has dirt on the US president’s family, so Kiev uses him as a bargaining chip, Andrey Derkach has claimed
FILE PHOTO: Viktor Shokin at the Ukrainian parliament in February 2015, after his appointment as Prosecutor General. © Vladimir Shtanko / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
The former Prosecutor General of Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who was famously sacked by then-President Pyotr Poroshenko, under pressure from US president Joe Biden, is being used by the current government in Kiev as a bargaining chip with Washington, controversial former MP Andrey Derkach has claimed in an interview.
Biden had Poroshenko sack Shokin in 2016, when he was Vice President in the Obama administration, and threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan otherwise. The now-incumbent US president claimed that the prosecutor was corrupt, and also bragged about getting rid of the man. Critics of Biden have alleged that he used his office to derail an investigation into the gas firm Burisma, which infamously retained his son Hunter on a well-paid board position during his father’s tenure as Obama’s VP.
Derkach made his explosive claims in an interview with Italian-US journalist Simona Mangiante, which she published on Wednesday on X (formerly Twitter). It was recorded in Minsk, Belarus.
“Shokin is now a hostage on Ukrainian territory. As far as I know, he is not allowed to leave Ukraine. He is under the total control of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),” he claimed.
📷📷BREAKING 📷Watch the full interview with Andrii Derkach, the Ukrainian parliamentarian who exposed Biden’s family corruption in Ukraine and that have been targeted by both Ukraine and the USA as result.He disappeared from the public ever since but we achieved to catch him… pic.twitter.com/kLCIDhCoal
— Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos (@SimonaMangiante) January 11, 2024
The senior figures interested in information possessed by Shokin are President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the US side, and President Vladimir Zelensky and his chief-of-staff Andrey Yermak on the Ukrainian side, according to Derkach.
He claimed that last October Shokin had contacts with two attorneys “working with the US Congress,” Jake Greenberg and Clark Abourisk. The SBU “recorded those conversations, where Shokin told the Congress about real criminal acts of Blinken and Biden, and about the corruption of the Biden family.”
The former official said he’d been tipped off about the surveillance by sources inside the SBU. Derkach is an intelligence officer by background and served in the Ukrainian agency before being elected to the parliament.
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He claimed that his sources had told him that “the question of liquidating Mr Shokin on the territory of Ukraine is under consideration.” He urged the US Congress to ensure the man’s safety and extraction from his home country.
During the hour-long interview Derkach spoke in Russian and touched on a number of sensitive aspects of US-Ukraine relations, including those he’d been personally involved in.
He was the official that published in 2020 what he claimed to be recordings of conversations that Biden and Poroshenko had in 2015-2016. In the interview this week he also claimed that he was acting with the blessing of Zelensky’s office, which was seeking to discredit the former president.
The US government branded Derkach a Russian agent in 2022 and indicted him for allegedly interfering in the 2020 presidential elections. Last year, Ukraine accused him of treason, claiming he was working for Moscow. Zelensky stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship in January 2023.
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Derkach has denied the accusations and claims in the interview that the Ukrainian charges against him were brought after Kiev failed to dispose of him by other means, on a direct request from Antony Blinken.
