The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (PGO), after it had been deprived of the right to carry out investigations from November 2019, has passed 15,000 volumes of investigation files on the economic part of the Maidan cases to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Director of the NABU Artem Sytnyk has said.

"There are 15,000 volumes. The problem is that five years have passed and the PGO did not investigate into the cases, and now they have been passed on. I cannot say that our investigators have familiarized themselves with 15,000 volumes over the period during which they have been in our possession," he said during a press briefing to sum up the results of work of the NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office in H2, 2019 in Kyiv on Friday.

The NABU is currently working to prevent the cancellation of European sanctions for the senior officials who were in office during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. The term of the sanctions expires in spring 2020, Sytnyk said.

"We understand the risks. And I have discussed with the prosecutor general a possibility of involving the prosecutors, who know these cases, into working groups so that the investigators could familiarize themselves with the cases as quickly as possible. We realize that responsibility for these cases rests with us, no matter whether we like it or not," he said.