Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

How Ukraine's President Fooled Joe Biden

Petro Poroshenko will tell IMF boss Christine Lagarde what she wants to hear in Davos. She should be skeptical.

January 25, 2018 at 9:13 AM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Watch what he does, not what he says.
Photographer: AURORE BELOT/AFP/Getty Images

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The liberal world order, insofar as it still exists, is about rules and conditionality: If you stay on the righteous path, you'll get help. On Tuesday, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden explained how this worked for Ukraine while he was the Obama administration's point man on the rebellious post-Soviet nation. The reminiscences should serve as a cautionary tale for International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who met Wednesday with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Davos to discuss the fund's lapsed cooperation with Ukraine.

Biden spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, in a setting that clearly put him in a relaxed mood. He recalled how, on what he says was his 12th or 13th visit to Kiev, he convinced Poroshenko and then-Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk to fire a prosecutor general -- Viktor Shokin, under whose watch corruption remained unchecked -- as a condition of releasing a $1 billion loan guarantee. Here's how it happened, in Biden's telling: