The Prosecutor General

From Our Own Correspondent

BBC

News, News Commentary

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2019

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Viktor Shokin was forced out as Prosecutor General of Ukraine in 2016. Since then he's been variously portrayed as a hapless bumbler or a fearless investigator of corruption. Jonah Fisher in Kiev has been trying to track him down.

In Vanuatu, an archipelago in the Pacific, they've come up with a new way of raising government revenue - selling passports for a princely sum. But Sarah Treanor says very few of those who take up the offer are likely to set foot there.

Italy is well known for its love of cycling. The Giro d'Italia, more than 100 years old, is one of the three great European races, demanding strength and stamina. But there's another race taking place this weekend. As Dany Mitzman finds out, appetite as much as stamina is what's needed.

The former BBC correspondent Robert Elphick died recently. He reported on many historic stories none more perhaps than the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. We hear one of his despatches from the time.

There was bad news this week in the State of Nature report about wildlife species in Britain that are threatened with extinction. It's not purely a British problem. Phoebe Smith has been following one particular conservation project on the Arabian peninsula.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
0:05.0	Good morning.
0:07.0	Need a new passport.
0:08.0	Why not buy one?
0:10.0	Amongst the sellers are a group of Pacific Islands,
0:12.0	and you don't have to go there to get one.
0:14.8	We sample a very Italian kind of cycle race, one not exactly for those speeding lean and
0:21.1	keen enthusiasts. We have a dispatch from the archives, remembering the Prague
0:26.5	Spring and Good King Wenseless, and a tale of shy and retiring leopards in Oman or maybe in Yemen.
0:36.5	But first the wind is rising in the US in the storm that might lead to the possible impeachment
0:42.4	of President Trump.
0:44.5	Its origin is a telephone conversation back in July which he held with the President of
0:49.9	Ukraine, Vladimir Zilensky. In Kyiv, Jonah Fisher says there's another key figure in the story.
0:57.0	Victor Schockin probably thought his race had been run, his unspectacular part in Ukraine's recent history, written.
1:07.2	The country's former prosecutor general was forced to leave his job three and a half years
1:11.5	ago and headed off into what he must have then thought
1:14.5	would be a gentle retirement. I've stared at a still picture of Mr. Schockin quite a bit
1:20.9	in the last ten days. We don't have any video. He looks every inch the old
1:26.7	school Soviet-era politician. Suited, generously proportioned, an overflowing neck, and plenty of white hair combed into a
1:36.8	side parting on top.
1:39.1	I've wondered what he's eating for breakfast, and what he's thinking about over his coffee. Because Victor Schockin,
1:46.7	aged 76 and 3 quarters, is right now at the center of the biggest story in the world.
	...

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