Ukrainian Energy Company Linked To Biden Investigated For Financing Terrorism

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Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts

Moscow is currently investigating the possibility that Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings could be involved in financing terrorism networks. The company is well known for its ties to Hunter Biden, the son of the incumbent American president. Western media has mostly ridiculed the claim as a priori ludicrous.

Larry C. Johnson, a former analyst at the US Central Intelligence Agency (the CIA) turned political commentator, has highlighted the fact that Joseph Cofer Black, a former top CIA official and ex-Blackwater vice chairman also happens to have served on Burisma’s board.

Burisma Holdings Limited was a Kyiv based holding company for a group of energy companies, having operated in Ukraine’s natural gas market from 2002 until being dissolved last year. It was owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, a Ukrainian oligarch wanted for attempting to bribe prosecutors and under investigation for shady deals involving Burisma. The intricate story has been haunting the Bidens (a 2019 Reuters story is titled “Ukraine agency says allegations against Burisma cover period before Biden joined”).

It is a well-known fact that the US-led West has amply employed terrorist groups as proxies for geopolitical purposes – the CIA has often played a major role in this. No one disputes that. We are not just talking about Cold War era facts. Such was precisely the case in Syria as well as in Libya where the Americans have time and time again funded and aided the most violent and radicalized rebel groups. Already in 1991, Graham H. Stuart, who was a Stanford University Professor of Political Science Emeritus, wrote that the terrorism of American enemies actually paled in comparison to Western sponsored terror – which remains true to  this day.

So much as talked about “state sponsors of terrorism”, but the truth is that there is no global terrorism without money laundering and Western banks as well as private corporations. Let us keep that in mind.

When it comes to Ukraine, I recently wrote on how its connections to terror and extremism would inevitably invite further scrutiny amid today’s information war, after all the West has supported violent extremism in that country for a decade.

Back in 2015, no less than Andrew E. Kramer (the New York Times Kyiv bureau chief) was reporting on the presence of a radicalized Islamic volunteer battalion, “stocked with Chechens”, collaborating with the Ukrainian far-right militias in Mariupol and in the disputed border regions: “the Ukrainians welcome backing even from Islamic militants from Chechnya”, he wrote. In his words, “the city [Mariupol] has come to rely on an assortment of right-wing and Islamic militias for its defense… The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right Sector, a Ukrainian militia.”

The aforementioned report casually noted, in 2015, that the Azov groups is “openly neo-Nazi, using the ‘Wolf’s Hook’ symbol associated with the SS” and, mentioning a source, added that “[the Chechen] said he got along well with the nationalists because, like him, they love their homeland and hate the Russians.”

As recently as April 2022, Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSAI) own handbook on international terrorism labeled the aforementioned Ukrainian Azov Brigade (originally the Azov Battalion) as a far-right neo-Nazi organization. This radical volunteer militia was formally incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard on 11 November 2014. Such labeling was removed by Japan on April 9, 2022, presumably after much political pressure for obvious reasons. Similarly, in March 2022, a CNN report on the Azov group was titled: “A far-right battalion has a key role in Ukraine’s resistance. Its neo-Nazi history has been exploited by Putin.”

A Time Magazine 2021 story on the same organization in turn was titled “Like, Share, Recruit: How a White-Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members.” It described Ukraine as a new hub for far-right activity, noting that “It might seem ironic for this hub of white nationalists to be situated in Ukraine. At one point in 2019, it was the only nation in the world, apart from Israel, to have a Jewish President and a Jewish… But in the context of the white-supremacist movement globally, Azov has no rivals on two important fronts: its access to weapons and its recruiting power.” The story quotes Isaac Kfir, a Charles Sturt University Professor and part of the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law advisory board, who warned that the Eastern European country had the potential to become “the Syria of the extreme right.” His analogy refers, of course, to the fact that during its civil war Syria became a hub for international terrorists – many of them, by the way, funded and armed by Washington and Western great powers, which is much the case with the infamous ISIS terror group.

Ukraine (which has the third highest criminality score of 33 countries in Europe) is not just “a longtime hub of arms trafficking”, as Washington Post reporter John Hudson described the country in May 2022. It is also a global hotspot for extremism and terrorism, which in itself is hardly surprising: the two things often come together – often with the aid of private companies and banks. Of course, each concrete case entails proper investigation, but in this overall context, is it really preposterous to imagine that holding companies involved in shady deals with Western powerful families and former CIA officials could play a role in aiding terror groups somehow? Honestly, I would be surprised if they didn’t. Anything else is naivety.

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