Enforcing Chinese Judgments and Awards in Ukraine: Procedure, Grounds of Refusal and the Fate of Statutory Post-Judgment Interest

Chinese creditors are used to a difficult question: a judgment of a Chinese court is easy to obtain and hard to export. Common law courts have been testing for more than a decade — since the Hong Kong Court of Appeal’s decision in 2012 — whether the statutory interest that accrues under Article 264 of the PRC Civil Procedure Law survives the journey abroad, and the answers have differed from London to Sydney to Hong Kong. Ukraine has not yet been asked. This article explains what a Chinese creditor should expect here, and why, in our view, the Ukrainian answer to the interest question is likely to be a favourable one.

The practical background is the trade balance. China is Ukraine’s largest trading partner and the flow is overwhelmingly one-way: Chinese suppliers sell into Ukraine, Ukrainian buyers pay, and when something goes wrong the debtor is usually the Ukrainian company. The assets, therefore, are usually in Ukraine, and the enforcement question is a Ukrainian question.

This article is written for the creditor who already holds a Chinese judgment, and for PRC counsel advising one. Readers approaching the dispute from the other end — before judgment, with a Ukrainian debtor who has simply stopped answering — will find the preliminary questions answered in Suing a Ukrainian Company: 20 Questions Foreign Counsel Ask, and the award side of the same subject in our note on enforcing a Chinese arbitral award in Ukraine, which deals with the procedure before the Kyiv Court of Appeal in detail. What follows concentrates on what that note does not cover: judgments of Chinese courts, the Treaty that carries them, and the fate of interest that keeps running after the decision.

In short: Judgments of PRC courts are recognised in Ukraine under the 1992 bilateral Treaty, and CIETAC and other arbitral awards under the New York Convention: two files with a different court, time limit and list of defences. Ukrainian law has no rule against enforcing foreign penal judgments, so statutory post-judgment interest under Article 264 of the PRC Civil Procedure Law should face only the public-order test, and the Supreme Court has already enforced an open-ended 6% late-payment charge on a CIETAC award. The arbitration route is tested in Ukrainian courts; the judgment route is not yet.

Ukraine recognises foreign judgments where an international treaty so provides or on the basis of reciprocity, which is presumed to exist unless the contrary is proved (Article 462 of the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine). For China the question does not even reach reciprocity: the Treaty between Ukraine and the PRC on Legal Assistance in Civil and Criminal Matters (《中华人民共和国和乌克兰关于民事和刑事司法协助的条约》) of 31 October 1992, in force since 19 January 1994, covers recognition and enforcement of judgments of courts and of arbitral bodies (Articles 3 and 17). Chinese civil and commercial judgments, court-approved settlements and the damages part of criminal judgments all fall within Article 17. The Treaty is also the only multilateral or bilateral route available: China signed the 2005 Hague Choice of Court Convention but has not ratified it and is not a party to the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention, to which Ukraine is. For the Ukrainian procedure as such, see our practice note on enforcement of foreign court judgments in Ukraine.

Arbitral awards are a separate matter, and the Treaty says so itself. Although Article 17 speaks of decisions of arbitral bodies as well, Article 22 provides that the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards is governed by the 1958 New York Convention (《承认及执行外国仲裁裁决公约》), to which both Ukraine and China are parties. The Treaty therefore creates no separate mechanism for awards: it neither adds a condition nor removes one, and a CIETAC award falls to be examined under the Convention and the provisions of Ukrainian procedural law that reproduce it (the earliest ruling, discussed below, applied the Treaty instead, with the same result). The practical consequence is that a Chinese creditor holding an award and a Chinese creditor holding a judgment have two different files with two different addresses in Ukraine — a different court, a different starting point for the three-year period, and a different list of defences available to the debtor. The award file is described step by step in our notes on enforcing a Chinese arbitral award in Ukraine and on the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards in Ukraine; this article follows the judgment file.

The procedure for judgments is short and predictable: the court notifies the debtor within five days and allows one month for objections, then fixes a hearing of which the parties are informed at least ten days in advance; the application is heard by a single judge in open court, and the failure of a duly notified debtor to appear without good reason does not prevent a decision (Article 467 CPC). Where the sum is expressed in a foreign currency, the court converts it into hryvnia at the National Bank of Ukraine rate as of the date of the ruling (Article 467(8) CPC). For arbitral awards the court states the sum in the currency of the award and, at the creditor’s request, also determines the hryvnia amount (Article 479(6) CPC).

A point creditors often miss. When the application for enforcement of a judgment is filed, the court may, at the applicant’s request, grant interim measures at any stage of its consideration if their absence could complicate or frustrate enforcement (Article 466(1) CPC). In practice this is the moment to freeze the debtor’s accounts — not after the ruling.

For judgments covered by a treaty, the grounds of refusal are those of the treaty (Article 468(1) CPC). Article 21 of the 1992 Treaty lists five: the judgment has not entered into force or is not enforceable; the case falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of the requested state; the absent party was not served with the summons in accordance with the law of the state whose court gave the judgment; there is a conflicting judgment or pending proceedings in the requested state, or a third-state judgment on the same dispute already recognised there; or recognition would harm the sovereignty, security or public order of that state. Outside treaty cases the Code’s own list applies (Article 468(2) CPC), which mirrors the same logic and includes the catch-all that enforcement “would threaten the interests of Ukraine”.

For arbitral awards, Article 478 CPC reproduces Article V of the New York Convention, including the public-policy ground.

Two features of that list matter for Chinese creditors. First, service is the real battleground — the same point that decides the fate of Ukrainian judgments in China, and the one defence a well-prepared file can neutralise in advance. Second, and decisively for the interest question, Ukrainian law contains no equivalent of the common law rule against the enforcement of foreign penal judgments. There is no filter through which a Ukrainian court could ask whether a component of the judgment is “penal” rather than “compensatory”. The only filter is the public-order reservation, which the Treaty words as sovereignty, security or public order.

Holding a Chinese judgment against a Ukrainian company? Send us the judgment and the service record — we will tell you whether it is enforceable here and what the debtor is likely to argue.

Article 264 of the PRC Civil Procedure Law (《中华人民共和国民事诉讼法》; Article 253 before 2022 and Article 260 in 2022–2023), as operationalised by the Supreme People’s Court Interpretation Fa Shi (2014) No. 8 (法释〔2014〕8号), adds to a judgment debt a fixed charge of 0.0175% per day — roughly 6.39% per annum — for the period of delayed performance. The English High Court enforced the charge in Hangzhou Jiudang Asset Management v Kei [2022] EWHC 3265 (Comm): although it accepted that the purpose was deterrent rather than compensatory, it held that the charge was neither “multiple damages” under the Protection of Trading Interests Act 1980 nor an unenforceable penalty. Australian courts have gone further: having called the label “double interest” “something of a misnomer” in Zhengzhou Lvdu v Shu [2024] NSWSC 58, they held the charge to be compensatory rather than penal in Fu v Pang [2025] VSC 597 and Shanghai Chenggong Industrial v Zhihua Chen [2025] NSWSC 1112. Hong Kong, by contrast, has treated the charge as penal since Hung Fung Enterprises v Agricultural Bank of China [2012] HKCA 251. The debate is summarised in two recent posts on conflictoflaws.net, by Meng Yu and by Meng Yu and Wenliang Zhang; the second proposes the more accurate name “statutory post-judgment interest”.

Ukrainian law approaches the same charge from a different starting point, and three features of it point the same way.

• No penal-judgment doctrine. As noted, the grounds of refusal are exhaustive. A Ukrainian court asked to enforce a Chinese judgment does not classify its components; it checks the Treaty conditions and the public-order reservation.
• A narrow public-order test. Ukrainian courts define public order, following the formula of Plenum Resolution No. 12 of 24 December 1999, as the legal order of the state and the determinative principles on which its system rests. The reservation is applied as an exception, not as a general fairness review. The best-known refusal, in case No. 824/241/2018 concerning an SCC award against the state-owned Odesa Port Plant, turned on the debtor’s status as a strategic state-owned, high-hazard chemical plant whose privatisation had not been completed, with the creditor’s links to a sanctioned Russian bank treated only as an additional argument; the court weighed the effect of collecting the whole sum on the plant’s safety, but did not single out or recharacterise any monetary component.
• A domestic analogue, and an express mechanism for running interest. Ukrainian law itself attaches statutory consequences to late payment of a monetary obligation, and for arbitral awards the Code goes further: where the award provides for interest and/or a penalty, the court must state in its ruling that such interest or penalty continues to accrue until the moment of enforcement, with the final figure calculated by the enforcement officer under the rules set out in the court’s ruling, taking account of the legislation in force (Article 479(4)–(5) CPC). Ukrainian procedure is thus structurally comfortable with a post-decision charge that runs until payment.
• And a precedent that is already on the books. In case No. 824/66/20 the Supreme Court, recognising a CIETAC award in favour of a Chinese creditor, granted leave to enforce not only the principal of USD 5,000,000 but also contractual late-payment penalties at 6% per annum running from 27 October 2015 until the entire sum is paid, and ordered the writ of execution to be issued in those terms. A Ukrainian court has thus already issued enforcement for an open-ended charge accruing after the decision, in favour of a Chinese claimant, without treating it as contrary to public order. The charge there was contractual rather than statutory, and the court itself called it a penalty, but the structural objection — that a Ukrainian writ cannot carry a sum which is not yet quantified — has been answered.

Honest caveat. No Ukrainian court has yet ruled on Article 264 interest specifically, and we say so plainly. The analysis above is an informed prediction, not settled practice. What a creditor can do is remove the avoidable risks: present the charge as statutory post-judgment interest with its legal basis and a transparent daily formula, and give the Ukrainian court and the enforcement officer a calculation they can reproduce.

Ukraine is not unfamiliar territory, and the record is more substantial than is usually assumed. Three decisions are worth knowing before a file is prepared.

In case No. 824/4/19 the Kyiv Court of Appeal, by its ruling of 26 March 2019, recognised and granted leave to enforce a CIETAC award of 27 November 2017 (case No. SZG20160099) in favour of J.S. Corrugating Machinery Co., Ltd. (京山轻机) against the Ukrainian guarantor, in the amount of USD 5,000,000 and CNY 452,865 by way of the arbitration fee advanced. The Supreme Court dismissed the appeals of the guarantor and of the buyer on 28 November 2019 and refused to “clarify” its ruling on 16 January 2020. The debtors’ main argument is instructive for anyone drafting a clause today: the guarantee referred disputes to the “South China sub-commission of CIETAC (Shenzhen)”, while the award was rendered by CIETAC itself (中国国际经济贸易仲裁委员会) in Shenzhen. On appeal the debtors argued that they had never agreed to arbitration before that body; in a later application for “clarification” the guarantor added that two differently named institutions had existed in the PRC at the relevant time — an echo of the 2012 split within CIETAC. The Supreme Court found the objection unproven, noting that the debtor had not challenged the tribunal’s jurisdiction in the arbitration and that both respondents had themselves appointed an arbitrator.

In case No. 824/66/20, concerning a second award of 27 December 2019 (case No. M20180943) against the Ukrainian buyer whose payment the guarantor in the first case had secured, the Supreme Court on 10 December 2020 did set aside the first-instance ruling — because the debtor received the summons on the day of the hearing, which the court held to breach Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights — but it then decided the application itself and granted it in full: USD 5,000,000, contractual late-payment penalties at 6% per annum from 27 October 2015 until payment, and CNY 537,180 by way of arbitration fee. The debtor’s public-order argument — that enforcement would bankrupt it and so deprive the state of future tax revenue — was rejected in a single sentence. The creditor’s legal costs were also recovered: EUR 10,301.43 for the first-instance stage, upheld by the Supreme Court on the same day, and a further EUR 13,494 for the Supreme Court stage (additional ruling of 18 March 2021).

The earliest reported case is older than both and shows that the route is not a recent invention: by ruling of 18 March 2013 in case No. 742/59/13-ц the Pryluky City District Court recognised and granted leave to enforce a CIETAC award of 29 March 2011 (case No. G20100185) in favour of Grand Peak (Tianjin) International Trading Co., Ltd., the Chinese buyer, against the Ukrainian supplier, the Pryluky plant Bilkozyn, whose goods had failed sanitary requirements and the specification: USD 181,644.48 (refund of the price paid) plus USD 4,053.11 interest and CNY-denominated sums for bank charges, customs duty, VAT, storage, inspection, travel, legal fees and the costs of the arbitration, applying the 1992 Treaty together with the recognition provisions of the Civil Procedure Code then in force. By contrast, a search of the Unified State Register discloses no case in which a judgment of a Chinese court has been recognised in Ukraine. The arbitration route is tested; the judgment route is not, and a creditor choosing between them should know which of the two it is entering.

Ukrainian courts have likewise enforced awards of the ICAC at the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in favour of Chinese and Hong Kong claimants, including Puyang Refractories Group and Chemeeti AP, and have granted attachment over a Ukrainian debtor’s assets to secure enforcement in favour of CNSC Fortune Hardware.

One formality a Chinese creditor does not have to perform. Documents drawn up or certified in the PRC by a court, a notary or another competent authority, bearing a signature and an official seal, need neither legalisation nor an apostille for use in a Ukrainian court: under Article 29(1) of the 1992 Treaty they may be accepted without legalisation, and under Article 29(2) official documents of one Contracting Party carry the evidentiary force of official documents in the other. A company’s power of attorney should therefore be notarised in the PRC. The Supreme Court relied on Article 29(2), together with Article 60(10) of the Commercial Procedure Code, on 11 August 2026 in case No. 904/2949/22, where the standing of the Ukrainian advocate acting for a Chinese company was challenged on several grounds, including the absence of legalisation or an apostille on the PRC-issued power of attorney, and upheld the finding that her authority was properly evidenced. The document still needs a certified translation.

The economics are favourable compared with most jurisdictions. The court fee for an application of this kind filed by a legal entity is 0.5 of the statutory subsistence minimum for able-bodied persons, a nominal amount (Article 4(2), item 1(4), of the Law of Ukraine “On Court Fee”). The Law also exempts applications to recognise a foreign court judgment under a treaty that provides for no payment on filing (Article 3(2)(13)), but the PRC Treaty provides for court costs on the same terms as for Ukrainian parties (Article 15), so a Chinese creditor should budget for the fee. Legal costs are recoverable from the debtor: in case No. 824/66/20 the Supreme Court upheld an award of EUR 10,301.43 in first-instance legal costs against the Ukrainian debtor and itself awarded a further EUR 13,494 for the appeal. A first-instance ruling on a well-prepared application is realistically a matter of months rather than years; the appeal, if the debtor files one, adds a further stage.

Enforcement itself runs through the state enforcement service or a private enforcement officer on the basis of a writ issued by the court (Article 470 CPC). Private enforcement officers are, in our experience, the more effective route for commercial debts: they are paid on results and have access to the asset and banking registers. The mechanics of the recovery stage, including what a creditor can realistically expect to find, are set out in our guide to debt collection in Ukraine and in the practice note on cross-border debt recovery.

Holding a CIETAC award with interest still running? Send us the award and your calculation — we will tell you what the file is missing before you file in Kyiv.

• Secure the service evidence now. The document proving that the Ukrainian defendant was duly notified of the hearing is the one piece the file cannot be rebuilt without.
• Check the three-year clock. It runs from entry into force of the judgment, and from the date of the award for arbitration — not from the date you discover the debtor’s assets.
• Quantify the interest. State the principal, the general debt interest and the statutory post-judgment component separately, each with its legal basis and daily rate, so that the Ukrainian court and the enforcement officer can calculate without interpreting Chinese law.
• Ask for interim measures with the application. A freeze obtained on filing is worth more than a perfect ruling three months later.
• Do not spend money on legalisation. Documents drawn up or certified by a PRC court, notary or other competent authority are admissible in a Ukrainian court without legalisation or apostille under Article 29(1) of the Treaty; what they do need is a certified translation.
• Translate properly. Certified translations of every document are a requirement (Article 18(2) of the Treaty); the Treaty also allows English (Article 7), but a Ukrainian translation is the safe choice. Translations are a frequent cause of applications being returned without consideration.

See our pages on enforcement of foreign court judgments in Ukraine, enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in Ukraine and cross-border debt recovery from Ukrainian companies. This note is not legal advice. Ukrainian law is stated as of 12 November 2026.