David Sakvarelidze was five months into a new job as Ukraine’s reformist deputy chief prosecutor when a witness came forward with intelligence that would change the course of everything.
The witness, a sand producer in the Kiev region, complained of men extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars. It took a while to persuade the man to give evidence. But when he did, and the investigation began, the trail led to two of the country’s highest-placed prosecutors.
A search of the men’s apartments revealed a scene that looked like a comic heist: bags full of cash, diamonds and other precious stones. But that was not the only incriminating evidence. Documents seized at the time indicated the men appeared to have a connection to the top prosecutor in the land, Viktor Shokin.
Police found copies of Shokin’s passports, property registration certificates and even his licence to carry firearms. One of the two men, it transpired, was Shokin’s former driver who had subsequently climbed the ranks behind his boss.
For Sakvarelidze, there were clear suspicions the two men may have been carrying out the business of the chief. But his attempts to investigate were frustrated. Soon, he faced a corruption investigation himself. At loggerheads with Shokin, he was pushed out of his job within the year.
The top prosecutor would also depart in March 2016, at the behest of US vice-president Joe Biden. It was an intervention into local politics that would come back to haunt both Biden and Ukraine.
Shokin’s year atop the prosecutor’s office was for a long time remembered simply as the time of the “diamond prosecutors”.
All that changed with the intervention of Donald Trump. The American president's description of Shokin as “that very good” prosecutor, quoted during his now-infamous 25 July call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, certainly surprised most Ukrainians. For the former prosecutor, it was a chance to rehabilitate himself.
The wild conspiracy theory on which Trump based his assertion – that Joe Biden had Shokin removed to stop him investigating wrongdoing in his son’s gas company – has already been widely debunked.
Put simply, the chronology doesn’t work – the investigation into Burisma, where Hunter worked, was dormant by the time Shokin was pushed out. It would also represent a major historical anomaly. During Shokin’s 13 months in office, not one major figure was convicted. No oligarch. No politician. No ranking bureaucrat. It would appear unlikely he was in the middle of breaking the habit with the Bidens.
But Shokin himself has put his weight behind the complimentary Trumpian narrative.
In an affidavit, submitted in September in an unconnected extradition case involving oligarch Dmytro Firtash, the former prosecutor said he had been dismissed because he refused to heed the advice of then-President Petro Poroshenko to drop an investigation.
“I was forced out because … I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden was a member of the board,” the statement reads.
Yet the image of Shokin as a crusading, independent prosecutor is inconsistent with the picture given by half a dozen former colleagues interviewed for this piece.
Unanimously, they described Shokin as a “dependent” creature; a man made in the image of whoever was his patron at the time.
In three terms in office, Shokin served three presidents as either deputy prosecutor or chief prosecutor. He made himself useful to all three, the sources say. He made himself especially indispensable to Poroshenko, with whom he has been linked since at least 2001.
“Shokin was quiet, unassuming, and he always fulfilled his orders,” says Oleksandr Martynenko, a prominent Ukrainian journalist who worked as press secretary to Leonid Kuchma, the first president under whom Shokin served.
“Shokin understood the hints, didn’t make scandals, and that’s how he survived and climbed the ladder in the first place.”
Born in Kiev in 1952, Viktor Shokin studied at the Ukrainian Academy of Agriculture, later graduating from the prestigious Kharkiv legal institute. After that followed three decades in the prosecutors’ office.
The first chunk of that career was spent as a lowly investigator. Shokin’s break came in the late 1990s, when he was chosen to head Unit 30, a new division in the Kiev prosecutors’ office devoted to organised crime.
And then, in 2002, came a quite unprecedented leap.
To outsiders, Shokin’s promotion from regional manager to the second most powerful prosecutor in the land looked magical. It was highly unusual for a candidate for one of the top public jobs not to have had significant managerial experience.
To insiders, the story was less mysterious.
In an interview in Kiev, the former chief prosecutor Sviatoslav Piskun, the man responsible for that promotion, revealed he hired Shokin after serious lobbying by Petro Poroshenko. At the time, the future president was a minor oligarch and deputy leader of the Our Ukraine faction in parliament.
For activists, Shokin’s prosecutorship is remembered for its failure to secure convictions for crimes of the previous regime. These include the killing of more than 100 protesters during the Euromaidan revolution.
“Shokin impeded those fighting for justice,” said Vitaly Tytych, a lawyer representing the families of the victims. “It is wrong to call what he did investigations. Because if there is one thing Shokin never did it is investigate.”
Serhiy Horbatyuk, who headed the special investigation department which was eventually given responsibility for investigating the Euromaidan crimes, clashed with the leadership of the general prosecutor’s office.
“On Euromaidan, Shokin did not actively impede our investigations,” he says. “But he didn’t help them either. It seemed deliberate.”
By the time Joe Biden arrived in Kiev in December 2015 to issue his infamous ultimatum, Shokin had lost the support of all but 3.5 per cent of Ukrainians.
Many MPs were also clamouring for his dismissal.
First among them was Yehor Soboliev, then a reformist MP of the Samopomich faction and chair of the parliamentary anti-corruption committee. In July 2015, Soboliev pressed for a vote on Shokin’s ousting. The arithmetic was always against him, as the general prosecutor was a figure of the ruling coalition. But he came surprisingly close, collecting 127 signatures from a required 150. Several members of the ruling parties broke ranks to support his move.
“We were under no illusions,” Soboliev tells The Independent. “We saw how Shokin had made an art of dumping cases while pretending to investigate. How he was a symbol of ineffectiveness and stalling. How he was the embodiment of the post-Soviet prosecutor.”
In summing up, David Sakvarelidze used a similar formula.
“Shokin was not a bad man per se,” he says. “He was simply a man of another era; a typical, post-Soviet Ukrainian prosecutor. But after Maidan, that was a certifiable condition.”
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