By Maxim Tucker
Ukraine’s former president (click here) paid bribes worth at least $2 billion (£1.4 billion) during his four years in office – amounting to almost $1.4 million for every day he was in power – according to evidence handed to investigators.
Viktor Yanukovych, who was toppled during Ukraine’s revolution in 2014, appears to have kept a detailed record of backhanders distributed while he was in government.
A logbook has emerged listing the bribes paid to former and serving Ukrainian officials. In particular, election commissioners were handsomely rewarded in return for guaranteeing victory for Mr Yanukovych’s Party of Regions in the parliamentary election of 2012.
“We know that it’s real because of the minutiae of the detail - that so many of the small details corroborate with events or activities that took place under Yanukovych,” said Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian investigative journalist turned MP who published the logbook....
Don't take my word for it, but, look to the Republicans in Congress clamoring for LNG ports to export USA methane to Europe.
The main goals of Gazprom in the European market (click here) are retaining its leadership position, ensuring reliable gas supplies, and improving the efficiency of its marketing activities.
European countries have been among the key consumers of Russian gas for over 50 years.
Gazprom is the largest exporter of natural gas to the European market....
There is absolutely no surprise in realizing the Obama Administration was very interested in having Ukraine remain autonomous.
April 22, 2014
By Andrew Higgins and Andrew Roth
Kiev - Vowing that the United States (click here) would never recognize Russia’s “illegal occupation” of Crimea, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday reiterated America’s support of Ukraine, declared that “no nation has the right to simply grab land from another” and called on Russia to stop supporting masked gunmen who have seized government buildings across the east of the country.
Mr. Biden’s remarks, made during a meeting with Ukraine’s interim prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, signaled strong American backing for the shaky new government in Kiev that Moscow does not recognize and condemns as the illegitimate fruit of a putsch engineered by the West.
In recent weeks, officials in Washington, including President Obama, have issued a string of warnings to Russia threatening increasingly harsh economic sanctions if the Kremlin does not help to de-escalate the crisis in eastern Ukraine. But those seem to have gone largely unheeded.
Mr. Biden’s stern words, accompanied by a pledge of a further $50 million in American aid and help to break Ukraine’s dependency on Russian energy supplies, underscored how little trust now exists between Washington and Moscow, despite their joint role in brokering an international accord on Thursday in Geneva that sought, so far with little effect, to defuse the crisis....
Yanukovych's corruption was like a spiderweb whereby the economic platform was OWNED by Yanukovych no different than the militias throughout the country while disarming the national military. The ability to unravel that corruption has been complicated.
The new Ukrainian leadership wanted to remove corruption and pivot to an economy that included Europe as a trading partner. As a result of that huge paradigm shift in Ukraine the countries willing to be involved was demanding they remove the corruption. The World Bank was the first among those demanding the end of corruption in Ukraine. These demands against Ukraine corruption began as soon as the revolution placed in leadership. There is no way any Biden, be it Joe or Hunter, was involved in corruption. It wasn't possible.
March 30, 2019
By Kari Volokh
...Ukraine’s Institute of Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER) (click here) has attempted to separate the wheat from the chaff by quantifying the effects of reforms that have been undertaken by the Ukrainian government since 2014. The report, produced by a team of Ukrainian economists and refereed by a panel of their distinguished Western peers, examines the economic consequences of key reforms to arrive at a quantifiable figure of the reduction of corruption in dollar terms.
The findings are startling. According to the study, reforms now in place in Ukraine have reduced national corruption by a staggering $6 billion per year—a figure equivalent to nearly six percent of the country’s official GDP. These reforms, and the increased effectiveness of state tax and revenue authorities have also helped to significantly reduce the size of the country’s once-formidable shadow economy....
President Trump is attempting to remove scandal from himself in regard to the Whistleblow that witnessed something untoward our democracy. He may be trying to discredit the former Vice President, but, it is more than that, he is trying to use the power within the presidency to protect himself and his own self-interests.
