You're reading: Herbst: Keeping Shokin as Ukraine’s prosecutor general is ‘an absolute scandal’

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst said on Oct. 24 that while Ukraine is winning one war, the one against Russia's invasion, it is losing another one, the "non-fight against corruption," as he put it.

Herbst, speaking to a gathering of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council in Kyiv, blasted Ukrainian Pesident Petro Poroshenko for not firing Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. He noted that not only has Shokin failed to prosecute corrupt lawbreakers since coming to office as a presidential appointee in February, he has actually assisted corruption — along with the judiciary.

“It’s an absolute scandal that Mr. Shokin is the prosecutor general,” Herbst said, adding that Poroshenko “doesn’t really understand how damaging this is to his reputation in the West.”

Herbst, who is director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center in Washington, D.C., said the failure of Ukrainian leaders to fight corruption is the top topic among those with whom he’s met in Kyiv in recent days.

“The level of frustration is very high,” Herbst, who served as the American ambassador to Ukraine from 2003-2006, said. “The level of frustration in Washington is very high.”

Herbst said that senior officials in the American, German and European Union have the same view.

“This cannot stand,” he said. “I suspect on the basis of zero inside information” that Poroshenko will have to fire Shokin soon.

“Mr. Poroshenko cannot talk in a serious way with world leaders as long as he has this stain on the administration,” Herbst said, then alluding to allegations of corruption among prosecutors. “I am sure Mr. Shokin has the means to live very comfortably in retirement. The point has to be that from this moment forward, corruption is no longer permitted at the highest levels of this country.”

The abject failure to counter corruption and create rule of law could lead to Ukraine’s third revolution since 2004. “I hope it doesn’t lead to the third Maidan,” Herbst said. But if another revolution happens, “responsibility lies with those who are not honest enough or strong enough or serious enough to do what is necessary.”

The failure to fight corruption also affects the extent to which the West is willing to assist Ukraine financially, militarily and with sanctions against Russia, he said. To continue receiving Western assistance, “Ukraine is going to have to make changes in the months to come. I don’t see that they have much of a choice.”

Herbst said that the corrupt way in which Ukraine is being governed has not changed substantially enough since independence in 1991.

“In Ukraine, there are laws and then there are the processes by which major decisions are taken. These are two separate things,” Herbst said. “The most important decisions since independence have been taken through these back-door processes. These back-door processes are where wealth is able to influence power and power is able to accomodate and increase wealth.”

The solution is clear.

“If you have an independent legal system — judiciary and prosecutor general’s office — and the decisions of this legal system are taken on an honest basis and enforced on an honest basis, the back-door processes could cease,” Herbst said.

Irina Paliashvili, a Kyiv lawyer who heads the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council’s legal committee, said that replacing Shokin will not be enough. She said a complete overhaul is required of Ukraine’s “kleptocratic, oligarch” legal system, whose judges, prosecutors and police are in power to protect elites and fuel corruption rather than fight it.

The old elites are getting “very comfortable again” to the point where energy mogul Dmytro Firtash, wanted in America on corruption charges that he denies, is talking about returning to Ukraine, where he would rejoin such allies as Serhiy Lyovochkin, the former chief of staff to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, Paliashvili said.

“Journalists are publishing pictures, information,” Paliashvili said, but the authorities are ignoring blatant cases of suspected corruption, including those involving Mykola Martynenko, the member of parliament who is the “right-hand man” of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

In contrast to Herbst’s bleak though widely shared assessment of Ukraine’s lack of progress in combating corruption, the former ambassador said that Ukraine has been able to put Russian President Vladimir Putin on the defensive on the war front.

Herbst said that Ukraine has proven that it is able and willing to fight to such an extent that Putin would need to escalate the conflict significantly — which would incur greater international wrath — to make progress on the ground.

He warned that Putin’s aims remain to either replace Ukraine’s current government in Kyiv with a Kremlin-friendly one or to continue to destabilize Kyiv’s current government to such an extent that it becomes hamstrung in foreign policy.

“If not Mr. Putin, senior people around him understand their Ukraine policy is failing,” Herbst said. That’s one reason the Kremlin has shifted the attention to Syria in the five weeks.

Herbst was critical of U.S. President Barack Obama. “I don’t think President Obama understands great power politics, doesn’t understand the danger to our society of Mr. Putin’s wanton disregard for international borders,” Herbst said.

He was also skeptical about whether Obama would visit Ukraine before leaving office in 2017 as his two immediate predecessors — George W. Bush and Bill Clinton — did.

“I think it would be a wonderful thing. I don’t think it’s high on his list of priority,” Herbst said. “I would have to say the odds are against it.”

Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]