The State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) will not complete the investigation of cases opened by the Prosecutor General's Office, and criminal proceedings in the bureau will be started "from a clean sheet," according to SBI Director Roman Truba.

He said in an exclusive interview with the Interfax-Ukraine news agency that cases would be investigated by investigators who were engaged in this initially.

"The legislator has allocated the time during which the investigators of the prosecutor's office have the opportunity to complete the pretrial investigation - these are two years. In fact, during this period it is possible to complete an investigation of any complexity, a multi-episode criminal case," Truba said.

According to Truba, it would be wrong to finish the cases of other investigators, since the main category of cases in the Prosecutor General's Office somehow relates to the events on the Maidan in 2014.

"Handing them over to new SBI investigators would mean putting them on a long pause, as new investigators need a lot of time to study many volumes of materials," he said.

When asked whether this means that the SBI will investigate only the cases that it will itself open, the SBI director said: "Yes, and I think that this is correct."

"We will not be able to start work if we are overwhelmed with so many cases. Every investigator who started proceedings, conducted an investigation and should be responsible for the quality and result of the investigation," Truba said.