Ukraine indicts three linked to Giuliani effort
Aimed to tie the Biden family to corruption
KYIV — Ukrainian police and prosecutors have accused two politicians and a former prosecutor of treason, saying they colluded with a Russian intelligence agency in aiding an effort by Rudy Giuliani several years ago to tie the Biden family to corruption in Ukraine.
Those accused include Kostyantyn Kulyk, a former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor general who had drafted a memo in 2019 suggesting Ukraine investigate Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, for his role serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.
Also implicated were a current member of Ukraine’s parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, and a former member, Andrii Derkach, who had publicly advocated for an investigation in Ukraine into Hunter Biden. They had also promoted a spurious theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had meddled in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
The three were indicted on charges of treason and belonging to a criminal organization. The charges refer to “information-subversive activities” and focus on actions in 2019 before the US presidential election. They do not say if or when the activity stopped.
In the run-up to the 2020 election in the United States, Giuliani and later President Trump had encouraged Ukrainian officials to follow up on the allegations against Hunter Biden. The effort included a phone call by Trump to President Volodymyr Zelensky in July 2019 urging an investigation into the Bidens, at a time when the Trump administration was withholding military aid for the Ukrainian army.
Critics say that pressure to investigate the Bidens was politically motivated, aimed at harming the elder Biden’s chances against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump and Giuliani denied that there was anything inappropriate about their contact with Ukrainian officials, with Trump describing his phone call to Zelensky as “perfect.” The administration said military aid to Ukraine was withheld over concerns about corruption in the Ukrainian government.
The events led to Trump’s first impeachment in the House of Representatives. He was acquitted in the Senate.
Ukrainian media on Tuesday suggested the indictments, too, had a political component for Zelensky: that they were intended to send a signal to Biden now, as his administration is pressing Congress for military assistance to Ukraine, that Kyiv will root out accused Russian agents, including those who had promoted accusations against his family.
In statements released Monday, Ukrainian police and the country’s domestic intelligence agency said all three men were members of a spy network established inside the Ukrainian government and handled by Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
The intelligence agency’s statement said the Russians paid members of the group $10 million. An aide to Derkach, Ihor Kolesnikov, was detained earlier and convicted on treason charges.
Two members of the group, Derkach and Kulyk, fled Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the statement said. Dubinsky was remanded to pretrial detention in a Ukrainian jail Tuesday.
Dubinsky, in a statement posted on the social networking site Telegram, said that the prosecutors had “not presented one fact” to support the accusations and that the charges were retribution for criticizing Zelensky’s government in his role as a member of parliament. He said that he testified a year and a half ago as a witness in a treason investigation of Derkach but at the time had not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Dubinsky was expelled from Zelensky’s political party, Servant of the People, in 2021 after the United States sanctioned him for meddling in the American political process.
The Ukrainian intelligence agency’s statement said that Kulyk had used his position in the prosecutor general’s office to promote investigations that worked “in favor of the Kremlin,” without specifying any cases.
In late 2018, Kulyk compiled a seven-page dossier asserting that Ukrainian prosecutors had evidence that “may attest to the commission of corrupt actions aimed at personal unlawful enrichment by former Vice President of the United States Joe Biden,” according to a copy leaked by a Ukrainian blogger.
The dossier suggested that Biden, when he had served as vice president, had tried to quash a corruption investigation into the natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, where his son served on the board. Former colleagues of Kulyk at the prosecutor’s office confirmed he had written the document, which helped set in motion an effort by Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani, and other supporters to press for an investigation in Ukraine.
In a phone call with Zelensky that became central to the impeachment case, Trump had asked the Ukrainian president to investigate supposed conflicts of interest by Biden when he was vice president, according to White House notes of the call. Trump denied he had linked military aid to Ukraine to the investigation of the Biden family.
Allegations of corruption and ties to Russia had trailed Kulyk for years in the Ukrainian media and among anticorruption watchdog groups before he compiled the dossier.