The NPR Politics Podcast - What the Ukraine Scandal Looks Like ... From Ukraine

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Earlier this year, Ukraine elected a comedian as its new president, kicking off a wave of reform that swept the country. Just as Ukrainians felt as though they finally had a chance at ending corruption in their country, they found themselves embroiled in a corruption scandal here in the United States.NPR's Gregory Warner of the podcast Rough Translation joins the NPR Politics Podcast to share his reporting from Ukraine. He shares the story of one newly elected parliamentarian as he races to fix a broken system before time runs out.Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of Rough Translation's mini series on Ukraine. Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. Last week, House Democrats voted to impeach President Trump. And through this entire impeachment process, you've heard a lot about Ukraine from the perspective of the United States. NPR's Gregory Warner has been reporting from the other side of the Atlantic. Hey, Gregory. Hey there. So, Gregory, you host a podcast called Rough Translation.

Talk to us about what you all do. Sure, sure. So we just finished our third season. And our tagline is stories from far off places that hit close to home. Essentially what we try to do is tell international stories that show that we are all part of this connected world. We're subject to the same forces. And there's a lot we can learn from the experiences of people abroad. And so you recently reported a two-part

series out of Ukraine that I think for a lot of our listeners is really interesting because we just haven't heard the perspective from the country that has been in some ways kind of at the center of a lot of these impeachment conversations. Yeah, I mean, I've actually been following the political drama in Ukraine before it publicly merged with our own. And I don't want this to sound like I knew that band before it was cool or anything, but I... But you did.

Well, I'm married to a woman who was born in Ukraine. And so, like, literally the day that Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency, I was hearing about it from my in-laws, who were mostly shocked that Ukraine had just elected a Jewish president. They had experienced Ukrainian anti-Semitism. And also, Zelensky just did not fit the mold of a typical Ukrainian leader. So I was always interested in heading over to Ukraine. But then this impeachment drama obviously added an extra layer. So you went to Ukraine to essentially find out what the other side of this conversation sounds like, what Ukrainians are

saying about the impeachment proceedings. Yeah, it was very much the impeachment proceedings, because suddenly the US was interested in Ukraine. And also, because what's interesting about the impeachment hearing, we hear so much about Ukrainian corruption, Ukrainian corruption, but actually, Ukraine is right in the middle of this very unusual attempt to fight corruption with this very unusual leader to fight corruption with this very unusual leader. So those two things, I wanted to find out how Ukrainians saw it. So we've heard a lot about Zelensky here in context of his relationship with President Trump, and we've gotten kind of a caricature of him, I feel. And I'm really curious to hear

how he's perceived in Ukraine and kind of who he is generally. What's interesting, I think, is that Zelensky shares a lot in common with President Trump, not the divisive rhetoric. He's very consciously unifying in his rhetoric, but they both come from the entertainment industry, both kind of came to fame through their role on a TV show. Zelensky, I think listeners know this part of the story. He played a school teacher who accidentally becomes the Ukrainian president on a sitcom called Servant to the People. But what's also I think this was in his inaugural speech. He basically did the same thing. He quoted another actor turned politician, Ronald Reagan, said that the government does not solve our problems. The government is our problem. And then, like he was elected to do, basically, he dissolved parliament, called for snap parliamentary elections, promptly put a bunch of people in his party that the condition was you'd never held office before. And they won. So suddenly something like 70 or 80 percent of the parliament has never been there before. Right. And you actually profiled in particular one member of the Ukrainian parliament who was part of that wave, who was he? So his name is Mitya Gurin. I became interested in him, frankly,

because he had so many reservations about joining the Ukrainian parliament. He's a very principled guy. He'd grown up really thinking of parliament as the den of corruption. Even his mom warned him, don't go there. Other people are going to be taking bribes. What are you going to do in that case?

I saw him as like a real Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of story. But then it was striking to talk to him about this because he saw it in this particular way. He'd looked at parliaments of the past and he saw this pattern. In time frame, the most active period is like half of a year. Six months. That's how long he felt it took for a critical mass of lawmakers to be on the take, for the disease of corruption to take hold and the normal functions of governing to cease. And after this, all the previous Ukrainian parliaments, they dropped down to the hell of corruption. That's a remarkably short window of time he's outlining. Yes. This is like a parliament sworn in in August is useless by Christmas. It's

incredible odds to take on. Does he feel that since you have this wave of people who have not been involved in politics before, are not members of parliament, it's not the political class just kind of taking its same seats in parliament year after year. Does he feel that that timeline is different now, that perhaps something with this new blood in parliament is going to be different? Definitely. And that's actually what he told his mom. He said, this is a younger generation. They knew that orange revolution that you covered, right? And these are people who are going to put the government's interests first.

He also felt that because they'd never held political office, they may last longer. But he is very open-eyed about the fact that corruption is always there. And there's actually an expression in this part of the world that says the law is an ox cart. It goes where you lead it. And so his whole mission, and I think partly the mission of this parliament is to pass new laws. But Greg, in listening to your podcast episodes, what I found so interesting is that he had these concrete examples of stories that he's heard from other members of parliament that suggest this vision of corruption and bribery is still fairly active. Oh, yeah. He says that he and the other parliamentarians, they get together sometimes on their downtime over drinks and just talk about the latest offers.

And this is not uncommon. They call the period after a new parliament is elected the time of offerings. So, for instance, he gives me the example of one colleague who was offered this monthly bribe by a local business leader just to stand up each month in parliament and give a speech bad-mouthing a rival. The first was like 30,000 per month. U.S. dollars? Yes. More money than most parliamentarians make in a year. When he refused, the offer rose. Higher and higher and higher.

And then the last was 70. Another colleague of Mitya told this story. A businessman offered him a position as a university lecturer. But he would be the only teacher in this university. And no students? No students, no. It was a proposal. They share those stories with you?

My colleagues? The colleagues. Of course, everybody is sharing. You never know if somebody agrees. Did they agree to the proposal? In other words, how much time does Ukraine

have left? There's a bit of a fatalism in how he describes this. It does sound very dark when I listen to that part of the podcast. I'm like, oh no, poor Ukraine. It's as if he expects that eventually this will happen. It's a force of nature. Yeah. And I really got the impression talking to him that it's not just a fight against corruption. It's a race. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk more about Gregory's reporting. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wix.com. With Wix, you can create your very own professional website.

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Melodies. It's Wow in the World from Tinkercast and NPR. Listen now and share with your kids. And we're back. And Ryan, you paid close attention to who was testifying on Capitol Hill. And there was a moment you were just telling me about regarding this idea of it being a race to clean up Ukraine. Right. The former U.S. special representative to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, said during the course of his testimony before House lawmakers as part of the impeachment inquiry that after Zelensky won office and then his party won a majority in

parliament, that from the U.S. perspective, there was basically almost a six-month period that that was going to determine the next six years, 10 years of Ukraine's future. And if the U.S. could get its relationship with Ukraine right, with Zelensky right, and get them on that path, then perhaps the U.S. relationship with Ukraine and Ukraine itself, as it wrestles with issues of corruption that we heard from Mitya and Gregory, that they could fix those issues or at least get on the right path towards fixing them. One thing I was struck by in Ukraine is how much the U.S. interest is tied in with the Ukrainian interest. I mean, the U.S. embassy in Ukraine is one of the largest in Europe. It's mostly, as I was told, national security people, because Ukraine is seen as a

bulwark against Russian intervention, Russian expansion. And so this race is not just a question of Ukraine's survival in terms of the US, it's very much part of a geopolitical national security issue. You know, Greg, you've talked a lot about how endemic corruption is in Ukraine, and how there is a sense of fatalism there around this sort of inevitability of having corruption permeate all aspects of life. One thing that I hear a lot about covering 2020 are these allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who was on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma. And whether or not that company was corrupt, whether or not what Joe Biden's son

was doing on that board was corrupt. And I should point out, these are not criticisms I often hear from Democrats. These are criticisms you hear from Republicans on what Biden and the Biden family has done. But I am curious how that conversation or that even question is being perceived in Ukraine. Yes. I mean, I would say that the relationship of Ukrainian companies to U.S. figures or people perceived as having some political power in the U.S. is a very long tradition. It definitely did not start with Hunter Biden. But I think it's such an important disconnect with the way we're debating it here

and the way Ukrainians see it. Because what we talk about is, you know, did President Trump break a law when he asked a favor of the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden's role? And the position of the Republicans, you know, tell me if this is fair, but it's like, oh, that's totally legitimate. Ask, investigate a potential case of corruption overseas. Just see if there was corruption there. What's the harm of asking? That is essentially, yes, I would argue the Republican talking point. Yes. Okay. And just tried to do in one sentence. But in Ukraine, there's such a long history of

basically corruption investigations being used as a tool to punish your political rival. And we see this actually in a lot of countries, I would say, with weak law systems. But, you know, we talked about, I think, in the first half about the laws in Oxcart, it goes where you lead it. That idea is that the law is so malleable that Burisma and Hunter Biden, they may have broken laws or they may not have. It really depends on who is investigating. when President Trump specifically referenced the prosecutor general to do this investigation, well, that specific office in Ukraine has a long history of basically taking a bribe to open the case, taking a bribe to close the case, going after political rivals, depending on who's president. So the corruption really starts with the anti-corruption investigation. In the case of Hunter Biden, it's not so much whether any laws were broken, it's the appearance of impropriety, the appearance of a conflict of interest. And one of the things that we've seen Republicans attack both Biden, Joe and Hunter on is that there was money laundered, there was a bribe taken. They registers is the propriety of the son of the vice president sitting on the board of a Ukrainian gas company when Biden is the point person for the Obama administration.

And that, to a lot of people, doesn't seem to smell quite right. So, Greg, we started this episode by acknowledging that the House, led by Democrats, voted just last week to impeach President Trump. And, you know, at the outset, you explained to us that your in-laws are from the region. And, you know, you talked to us about what they thought when President Zelensky was first elected. I'm curious, have you talked to them at all lately? And what are they saying about impeachment? So I'm not going to out my in-laws' views on impeachment, but I will say that one of the first laws that Zelensky passed or Zelensky's parliament passed when he was elected was a law that the president of Ukraine can be impeached. And that is seen as a kind of hallmark of democracy when

Zelensky did that. And I do believe that this whole process is viewed by Ukrainians in lots of ways. Many just want it to all go away. Many do see it as partisan. But just the fact that a head of state can be impeached in a process is seen by Ukraine as a model. All right, Greg, thanks so much. And of course, there is more about Ukraine in the Rough Translation podcast feed. I know you all did another episode on the comedy scene in Ukraine and how that's all tied into politics there. Just just real briefly, talk to us. What's that episode about? So comedy in Ukraine has this long history as being a kind of parallel to politics. We don't have time to get into it. But basically, Zelensky as a 19-year-old

was representing Team Ukraine in this Moscow TV show. That was a win for all of Ukraine. It's kind of seen as American Idol meets World Cup. And so we go to the semifinal. Yeah, we go to the semifinal on the edge of a war zone to look at what representing your region through comedy looks like today in Ukraine. All right, we're going to leave it there. And of course, you can find

that comedy episode as well as the other episode about Ukraine that Greg did. Wherever you find your podcast feeds, just look up Rough Translation. And thanks so much, Greg. Thanks. It was fun. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign.

I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.