Fixed course

"Despite the lack of clarity on the actual implementation, the process of legal fixation of the damages has already begun and is only gaining momentum through the receipt of decisions of Ukrainian courts and arbitration tribunals." - this is how Dmytro Tylipskyi and Oleksiy Stepanenko, counsels at EQUITY, comment on the issue of compensation for damages caused by the war for the annual survey of the TOP-50 leading law firms in Ukraine by the Yurydychna Practyka publication.

In the article "Fixed course", Dmytro Tylipskyi and Oleksiy Stepanenko described the current situation regarding the actual receipt of compensation for damages caused by the Russian Federation, and also shared the existing court practice in this area, emphasizing the specifics of such cases.

We have collected a few key points from Oleksii and Dmytro's article:

• The issue of actual compensation is still at the draft stage. Various options are being proposed: transfer of frozen assets to the Russian Federation in different countries, voluntary reparations, etc;
• During 2022-2023, Ukrainian courts made hundreds of decisions to recover compensation for damages from the Russian Federation. However, if 2022 can be called a year of "testing the waters" or creating new approaches, 2023 is a year of accumulation of unresolved issues;
• The current procedural legislation, namely the Economic Procedure Code of Ukraine, does not define the state as an independent entity that can be a party to the economic process;
• In the realities of the war, we clearly see that the damage caused to the plaintiff was not caused by the actions of a specific body of the aggressor state, but by the state itself as an entity. Thus, the state and all persons whose personal or collective will underlies the armed aggression should be held liable for the damage caused;
• Ukraine is in the center of historical events, but it is certain that we have no right to make a mistake, we cannot slow down in the struggle in all dimensions: military, historical, cultural, and legal.