A bipartisan coalition called for Ukraine to fight endemic corruption and remove Shokin.
• In February 2016—a month before Shokin was fired—Republican Senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk, and Ron Johnson sent a letter with Democrats urging then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office.…”
• At a March 15, 2016 Senate hearing before Shokin’s removal, John E. Herbst, a former Ambassador to Ukraine in the Bush Administration, testified that “Shokin was a compromised figure” and described how by “late fall of 2015, the EU and the United States joined the chorus of those seeking Mr. Shokin’s removal as the start of an overall reform of the Procurator General’s Office.”
• In 2019, Republican Senator Johnson stated: “The whole world, by the way, including the Ukrainian caucus, which I signed the letter, the whole world felt that this that Shokin wasn’t doing a [good] enough job. So we were saying hey you’ve...got to rid yourself of corruption.”
• In 2019, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent told House investigators that “there was a broad-based consensus that he [Viktor Shokin] was a typical Ukraine prosecutor who lived a lifestyle far in excess of his government salary, who never prosecuted anybody known for having committed a crime, and having covered up crimes that were known to have been committed.” The international community also called for action.
• Ukrainian officials had been calling for Shokin’s removal for months. In October 2015, news outlets reported that “more than 100 of Ukraine’s 450 members of parliament have called for Shokin’s dismissal.”
• In February 2016, a senior Ukrainian prosecutor, Vitaliy Kasko, resigned, stating: “Today, the General Prosecutor’s office is a brake on the reform of criminal justice, a hotbed of corruption, an instrument of political pressure, one of the key obstacles to the arrival of foreign investment in Ukraine.”
• Also in February 2016, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, threatened to suspend a $40 billion aid package, stating: “I am concerned about Ukraine’s slow progress in improving governance and fighting corruption, and reducing the influence of vested interests in policymaking. Without a substantial new effort to invigorate governance reforms and fight corruption, it is hard to see how the IMF-supported program can continue and be successful.”
• On March 29, 2016, Jan Tombinksi, the European Union’s envoy to Ukraine, stated that Shokin’s removal would be “an opportunity to make a fresh start in the prosecutor general’s office” and adding a new Prosecutor General would ensure that this office “becomes independent from political influence and pressure and enjoys public trust.” 3
• Transparency International ranked Ukraine 142nd of 175 countries in its Corruption Perception Index in December 2014 and singled out Shokin as “personally responsible for the failure to fight corruption among top officials.”
• In a September 3, 2020 in interview with the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Victoria Nuland, the former Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, explained that the United States had been “warning along with the Europeans, along with the—International Monetary Fund, along with the World Bank for months and months and months that the [Prosecutor General’s Office] needed cleaning up ... and that as long a [sic] Shokin as the head of the PGO, we were not going to get significant anti-corruption reform in Ukraine. And we should not be putting more U.S. tax dollars into Ukraine in that circumstance.”