To begin with, someone here knows what mysterious office job Dodgy did Biden perform, to deserve 50.000 USD per month in Ukraine, a country he does not speak the language of, and had no knowledge of at the time?
Russian language media has also talked about the origins of the Biden-Ukraine scandal.
Here is a basic summary of how the scandal originated in Ukraine. It's also a classic example of how much corruption there has been and still is in Ukraine, how the country really works. Americans should really think about this before choosing to send any American taxpayer money as financial assistance to Ukraine.
This goes back to the Ukrainian businessman and politician named Nikolai Zlochevsky (Mykola Zlochevsky in Ukrainian). He was a member of former President Viktor Yanukovych's corrupt administration before the 2014 Maidan events, and had been the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources at one point. During his time in that position under the Yanukovych cabinet, Zlochevsky created a company called Burisma Holdings. He then used his position to illegally give licenses to his company, giving Burisma the sole right to develop Ukraine's natural gas deposits. With this monopoly Zlochevsky became one of the richest oligarchs in Ukraine.
In February 2014, during the events of the Maidan, he fled Ukraine and moved to the United Kingdom. However, the UK Serious Fraud Office froze about $23 million of his funds that he tried to transfer to London through BNP Paribas accounts (the Rothschild bank of France) via Latvia. The UK authorities correctly thought he was laundering money gained from criminal activity, and sent people to Ukraine to get information from the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine to investigate further, but it was never given. So his funds were unfrozen in January 2015.
After Poroshenko came to power, he wanted to take control of Zlochevsky's assets and give it to people he trusted, that answered to him. Not because what he did was corrupt and illegal but just because Poroshenko and his clan of oligarchs wanted to take his wealthy business for themselves. Under Poroshenko's orders, the Office of the Prosecutor General investigated Zlochevsky by starting with tax evasion and going from there, seeming to have enough evidence to continue the case to its logical conclusion.
But from 2014, Zlochevsky suspected this and essentially decided to buy political protection from the West. For this purpose he brought on Burisma's board of directors people like Hunter Biden, former President of Poland Aleksander Kwaśniewski, former CIA officer and director of the CIA counterterrorism center Joseph Cofer Black, and the Jewish investment banker and lawyer affiliated with Joe Biden, Alan Apter.
Biden and the others were receiving money for protecting Zlochevsky. Hunter Biden's company received a total of $3.1 million from Burisma in 2014-2015. Around that time the UK unfroze his money.
That's because at that point, Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, Poroshenko's guy who was going after Zlochevsky on the president's orders, was replaced after Joe Biden threatened the president by withholding foreign aid to Ukraine in order to protect his son. Shokin's successor Yuriy Lutsenko was appointed on the condition to close down the case against Zlochevsky and Burisma, and Lutsenko himself said he had received a "do not prosecute" list from the US embassy in Kiev. This was gradually done, and eventually Lutsenko transferred the case to the recently established National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, which is known for its close ties to the US embassy, where it died. For a whole 2 years the Bureau could not gather enough evidence for anything against Zlochevsky. Also the Ukrainian courts blocked a request from the government to revoke Burisma's illegally-gained licenses to the natural gas deposits.
Since 2016-2017 it has also become known that Zlochevsky has even been able to return to Ukraine and engage in business again.
So, everyone involved was criminal, including Zlochevsky, who had been trying to protect his ill-gotten gains; Poroshenko, who went after him to try to seize control of his business; Shokin, who was investigating him on Poroshenko's orders; and Joe Biden, who threatened the Ukrainian president into dropping the investigation to protect his son's reputation in dealings with criminal Ukrainian oligarchs.
Joe and Hunter got involved in what was essentially a gang war between rival clans of Ukrainian oligarchs (business as usual in Ukraine). It also shows that all of Ukraine's talk of "successful democratic reforms and anti-corruption transparency" is just empty rhetoric while Ukraine is still rife with corruption, and besides that it also goes to show how deeply the US is involved in all of this, from the level of the US embassy in Kiev all the way up to the Vice President of the United States and his family. I have heard information before that the US embassy in Ukraine for the past five years has been a hive of all sorts of criminal activity, but I did not know it went this far.