In 2019, a sitting president was impeached after pressing Ukraine to investigate matters involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Viktor Shokin's explosive new book, “Biden’s Corruption and War,” offers a first-person account from one of the figures at the center of that controversy.

No freedom-loving American can forget the video of then-Vice President Joe Biden recounting how he threatened to withhold U.S. loan guarantees unless Ukraine fired its prosecutor general.

Americans deserve to know how their government uses power abroad, how foreign aid is distributed, and whether politically connected families benefit.

“Well, son of a bitch. He got fired,” Biden said. “And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”

The clip has been replayed for years because it sounds, at minimum, astonishingly cavalier: a sitting vice president boasting that American leverage forced the removal of a foreign prosecutor.

The central dispute is why.

Shokin says he was removed because he was pursuing corruption connected to Burisma and investigating matters involving Hunter Biden. Biden and his defenders have long maintained that Shokin was ineffective and that U.S. pressure for his dismissal reflected a broader Western anti-corruption consensus.

That conflict is the heart of Shokin's book.

The stakes were high enough that Trump's efforts to press Ukraine for investigations eventually produced one of his impeachments. Shokin's account asks readers to revisit the events that made Ukraine such a combustible subject in American politics.

Here was Joe Biden celebrating the removal of Ukraine's prosecutor general, Shokin — the man who says he was pursuing Burisma, the energy company that had placed Hunter Biden on its board.

For years, Biden and his allies insisted there was nothing improper to see in Hunter Biden's Burisma role or Joe Biden's conduct in Ukraine.

Now the fight over that history has begun in earnest. Joe and Hunter Biden are back on the interview circuit, while the ex-president’s memoir is on the way. The authorized version of history is being written now. Shokin's book is meant to challenge it.

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The Ukraine war as a vehicle for hidden agendas

Shokin presents a stark thesis: He argues that the war in Ukraine became a vehicle for corruption and hidden agendas extending far beyond the battlefield.

Among his most explosive allegations are claims that $350 billion in U.S. taxpayer money was recycled through political and globalist networks, that arms arrangements were tainted by corruption, and that wartime chaos facilitated the trafficking of Ukrainian women and children.

Those are grave allegations. They come from a man who says he paid a personal price for getting too close to uncomfortable truths. But they remain allegations, and the book should be read as Shokin's case — not as independent proof of every charge.

Inside Biden’s corruption and war

Shokin has practiced law since the 1980s and served multiple times as deputy prosecutor general before becoming prosecutor general. He says his troubles began when he was investigating Mykola Zlochevsky and Burisma.

Shokin in the book gives his account of the pressure campaign that ended with his removal.

He writes that Joe Biden was known in Ukraine as the "Vice King" and portrays the vice president as wielding extraordinary influence over then-President Petro Poroshenko and the Ukrainian government.

The book lays out names, dates, meetings, and episodes that Shokin says connect the Burisma investigation to the effort to fire him.

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Censorship and the fight for the record

Shokin also argues that his story has been suppressed through limited media attention and reduced online visibility. He describes a system in which war, foreign aid, lobbying, and personal enrichment became intertwined, and he presents his own removal as one episode in that larger pattern.

Whether readers accept all of his conclusions or not, the book raises questions that deserve examination rather than dismissal.

Shokin's case is not merely historical. He argues that the same patterns of influence, opaque foreign aid, and political pressure continue today in Ukraine and elsewhere.

That claim should be tested, not waved away.

Americans deserve to know how their government uses power abroad, how foreign aid is distributed, and whether politically connected families benefit from relationships that ordinary citizens would never be allowed to maintain without scrutiny.

"Biden's Corruption and War" is valuable because it puts the testimony of a central participant into the record. It may not be the final word, and it does not relieve readers or journalists of the duty to verify its most serious claims.

But it does make it harder to pretend there is no dispute at all.

Read it before the people who tried to bury this story write the only version anyone remembers.