Is Joe Biden a Wanted Criminal in Ukraine?

Social media users have shared a sentence about the United States (US) President Joe Biden purportedly being a wanted felon in Ukraine since November 2020.
According to details, the posts continued to appear well into 2021 and read: “Ukraine has now listed Joe Biden as wanted on Class A felony charges.”

The posts were often accompanied by a May 2020 video from the far-right One America News Network (OAN):

The chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, said that “a Ukrainian Court ordered Joe Biden to be formally listed in a criminal case.”

The story all started in 2016 when Biden was vice president. At that time, Trump and his allies long have pointed to Biden’s efforts in March 2016 to pressure the Ukrainian leadership to fire Shokin, who had previously led an investigation into Burisma’s owner. The Associated Press reported that Shokin had been “widely accused of doing nothing to combat Ukraine’s entrenched corruption.”

In 2019, Trump accused Joe Biden of shutting down a “very good” Ukrainian prosecutor to stop a corruption investigation, but the prosecutor in question had a less than stellar record.

The BBC published that the phone call “came shortly after Mr. Trump had blocked the release of military aid to Ukraine.” It also reported that “a senior official later testified the president had made clear the release of this aid was conditional on Mr. Biden being investigated,” something that the White House denied.

An investigation was “launched in February [2020] after the ousted prosecutor, Shokin, appealed to a court,” NBC News reported. According to the report, “Ukrainian authorities have closed a criminal probe into Joe Biden, who was accused of improperly forcing the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general in 2016.”

However, the most important detail here might be the fact that Ukrainian law allows anyone to go to court to simply request an investigation.