WASHINGTON — Former Ukraine prosecutor general Viktor Shokin says in a new interview set to air Saturday night that he believes — but lacks direct evidence — that President Biden and his son Hunter received bribes in exchange for forcing him out of office in early 2016.

“I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade in an excerpt of the interview released Friday.

“And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” added the former top law enforcement officer in Kyiv.

Shokin is a central figure in the controversy over alleged Biden family influence-peddling, which could morph into a House impeachment inquiry as early as next month.

The former prosecutor is rarely seen in Western media and his perceived credibility — or lack thereof — could dramatically shape efforts to impeach and remove the president from office.

Shokin was dismissed by a vote of Ukraine’s parliament in March 2016 following intense pressure from then-Vice President Joe Biden.

His office had been investigating Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of natural gas company Burisma Holdings, which paid then-second son Hunter Biden up to $1 million per year as a member of the company’s board beginning in April 2014.

Biden publicly claimed credit for forcing out Shokin by threatening to withhold $1 billion in US loan guarantees.

“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden said at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018. “Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”

An FBI informant file released publicly last month said that Zlochevsky claimed in 2016 that he was “coerced” into paying $5 million apiece in bribes to Joe and Hunter Biden in exchange for Shokin’s ouster.

Congressional Republicans are demanding to know what the FBI and Delaware US Attorney David Weiss’ office did to investigate after receiving that information in June 2020.

In a second clip of Kilmeade’s interview with Shokin, the former prosecutor claimed that Joe Biden was responsible for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which occurred in early 2014, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma.

“Everybody knows that it was because of Joe Biden’s actions that Russia was able to claim Crimea without firing a single shot, which of course eventually led to a full-scale war that is currently underway,” Shokin said.

In a second clip of Kilmeade’s interview with Shokin, the former prosecutor claimed that Joe Biden was responsible for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which occurred in early 2014, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma.

The full explanation of Shokin’s claim was not immediately clear.

Biden did play a significant role in the Obama administration’s early efforts to “reset” relations with the Kremlin, but his focus on Ukraine grew after the annexation of Crimea.

Democrats say that investigations of Biden’s alleged role in his family’s foreign business dealings amount to a political smear and impeached then-President Donald Trump in late 2019 for pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation of the Biden family.

Democratic impeachment managers argued that Trump was wrong to perceive corruption in Shokin’s ouster and said that his removal was a widely sought goal of the US and Western European countries.

They also argued that Shokin was not actively investigating Burisma when he was fired.

However, in the past few weeks, there have been significant developments in the storyline.

This week, purported internal Obama-Biden administration emails published by Just the News indicate officials were surprised that Biden was pushing for Shokin’s ouster as a condition of US aid.