Ukraine likely to pursue the cases that Trump urged on President Selensky in a controversial phone call last July.

KYIV, Ukraine—The Daily Beast has learned from an influential member of Ukraine’s parliament, from one of the country’s prosecutors, and from a center combating corruption that the government here is likely to pursue the cases that President Donald Trump urged on President Volodymyr Zelensky in a controversial phone call last July. But not the way Trump intends, and not necessarily to the detriment of Trump challenger Joe Biden.

The investigations and possible prosecutions, if they happen, would take place in the context of a new law signed by Zelensky just before his departure for the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he is expected to meet face to face with Trump for the first time.

In Kyiv, there are widespread hopes that the reforms will help Zelensky, a former comedian who played a corruption-fighting president on television, deliver on his campaign promise to clean up Ukraine for real. A new team of independent prosecutors is supposed to re-open investigations of past cases and answer questions about the corruption in post-revolutionary Ukraine over the last five years.

During much of that time, investigations were launched against various powerful oligarchs, then quietly shut down when, it was widely assumed, the prosecutors were paid off. As a result it has been hard to know if the investigations were justified or merely launched for purposes of extortion.

“We are trying ultimately to re-set the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, to speed up the reform,” Kirill Timoshenko, deputy head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. In accordance with the new law, all Ukrainian prosecutors will go through a process of recertification. The number of prosecutors will be cut down from 15,000 to 10,000. Timoshenko said he could not comment on specific cases and could not say more about Zelensky’s agenda for the meeting with Trump on Wednesday. 

Valentin Nalyvaichenko, a former head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, says he expects the corruption case of the Burisma gas company—two cases were opened and dropped by various prosecutors over the years—to be revisited. Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, was a board member. 

Joe Biden is now Trump’s leading opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, and both Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, have been working to find dirt on Biden in Ukraine. 

Nalyvaichenko said his country will be best served by pursuing an investigation related to Burisma’s alleged multi-million-dollar corruption deals, not because of Trump’s pressure but because Ukraine wants to know the truth about its own corruption, whether the founder of Burisma, Ukraine’s ex-minister of natural resources Mykola Zlochevsky from 2010 to 2012, had paid to quash the earlier investigations into the way he acquired gas licenses.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Nalyvaichenko said Ukraine’s parliament is planning to hold hearings about the various corrupt schemes. Nalyvaichenko, who is a member of the opposition Fatherland Party, serves in a parliamentary group focused on U.S.-Ukraine relations.

“I am going to support President Zelensky’s initiatives to have new investigations by a new team at the law-enforcement agency,” Nalyvaichenko said. This would include inquiries into the actions of previous prosecutor generals, Yury Lutsenko and Victor Shokhin. “I am convinced that Zelensky will say in New York that these are our domestic investigations, we are going to figure them out on our own.” He added, however, “We’d be happy to cooperate with the FBI.”   

Prosecutor Sergiy Gorbatyuk investigated the founder of Burisma company, Zlochevsky, for three months in 2016, until Prosecutor General Lutsenko made a decision to drop the probe. First, Lutsenko took the case away from the investigators, then closed it down illegally, Gorbatyuk told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

“There would not have been any question [about pursuing] such cases today, if Lutsenko did not interfere in the investigations,” the prosecutor said. “I hope that with the change of management at the prosecutor general’s office, there will be no illegal interferences and this case as well as other probes will be investigated strictly in accordance with the law.”