Inside Joe Biden's brawling efforts to reform Ukraine -- which won him successes and enemies

Vice President Joe Biden was losing his temper, dressing down the president of Ukraine in front of a group of high-level advisers and officials from both countries inside a regal complex at the United Nations.

“Don’t give me this bullshit,” Biden bellowed in the September 2016 encounter, according to an aide who was present, unloading on Petro Poroshenko after Biden felt he was making excuses for failing to root out corruption involving the country’s state-owned gas company.

“There’s nothing that happens in Ukraine you don’t know about,” Biden continued. “If something like this happens again, I’m done with you.”

The public humiliation of Poroshenko illustrated the unusually aggressive approach employed by Biden, the Obama administration’s chief Ukraine envoy, to bring the small but strategically important former Soviet republic closer to the West. It was an approach that yielded successes but also earned Biden and his aides a slew of enemies and detractors in Ukraine, and it may now have boomeranged to hurt his 2020 presidential campaign.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-joe-bidens-brawling-efforts-to-reform-ukraine--which-won-him-successes-and-enemies/2019/10/19/34178618-f1cf-11e9-b648-76bcf86eb67e_story.html