Ukraine ex-minister rejects Trump, Biden claims

Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin has categorically rejected claims by Donald Trump concerning Mr Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Mr Trump has alleged, without evidence, that Mr Biden pressed for the sacking of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect a business that employed his son.

Mr Klimkin told the BBC that the prosecutor was sacked for corruption.

A number of Western bodies, including the European Union (EU), had pushed for the prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to be sacked, he said.

Mr Trump faces impeachment proceedings for using his position as president to push the Ukrainian President, Vladimir Zelensky, to investigate Mr Biden, who was at the time leading polls to be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, it was revealed by US media that the whistleblower whose complaint led to the impeachment inquiry was a CIA officer who once worked at the White House.

And 300 former US national security officials signed a letter supporting the impeachment. They described Mr Trump’s actions as a “national security concern”, and said he appeared to have committed “an unconscionable abuse of power”.

Mr Trump dismissed the impeachment proceedings as a “witch-hunt”.

Impeachment is a two-stage political process, rarely exercised, by which a US president can be removed from office for wrongdoing.

Even if President Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, he is unlikely to be forced out of the White House because Republicans control the Senate.

Mr Klimkin, who was serving as foreign minister when Mr Shokin was sacked in 2016, said there was “definitely” no evidence that his removal was for anything other than corruption.

“The whole sense of this push was to sort out, to deliver on reforms in Ukraine,” he said. “It was not about the prosecutor general. It was about prosecutor offices which were systemically corrupt.”

He said it was important to have a full reshuffle of the offices, and pressure was coming from the whole international community, not just Mr Biden or the US individually.

The BBC’s Jonah Fisher in Kiev says Mr Klimkin’s words serve to reinforce what has been the almost universal reaction from credible voices in Kiev, namely that Mr Shokin had been an obstacle to fighting corruption.

On July 25, Mr Trump raised Mr Shokin’s removal during a phone call with newly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, details of which were released by the White House this week. -BBC