Lack of aggression was a description many would use for Shokin’s approach to the job in his third spell. Two of the people interviewed for this article described the former chief prosecutor as “lazy”, and
uninterested in real investigations. Others noted a penchant for bonding with oligarchs over vodka in the bathhouse.
“He wasn’t exactly highly professional,” said one source, a current Kiev-based prosecutor who asked to remain anonymous. “Shokin would always sign documents without really looking at them. On the other hand, he’d let us get on with our jobs, and was quite democratic, which we all appreciated.”
Another source said Shokin’s tenure as Ukraine’s general prosecutor was “no more, but no less corrupt” than what went before it.
That, of course, was not a ringing endorsement. Since the fall of the USSR, the prosecutor general’s office has come to be considered one of the least trusted public institutions in Ukraine. In Soviet times, abuse of justice was ideological in nature, but the job was largely respected. Around the mid-1990s, corruption began to take over as the main driver. Over time, the institution degenerated into something resembling a legalised racket, sources say.
“When I joined we were doing 80 per cent honest endeavour, and 20 per cent corrupt,” says one prosecutor, who began his career in the late 1990s.
“Now things have switched, and it’s only 20 or 30 per cent honest. The main thing that matters is making the boss happy, and ultimately that means making the president happy. Everything else is for sale.”
The approach of Shokin’s office to the Burisma investigations fell into a well-practiced pattern of corruption, the anonymous prosecutor says. By the time of Biden’s intervention,
there were no active investigations to speak of.
“If the idea was to get a result on the Burisma case, Shokin would have put his top people on it,” he says. “That didn’t happen. The aims were different.”
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