Enforcing a Polish Judgment in Ukraine: What the Court Will Actually Examine

A Polish creditor holding a final judgment against a Ukrainian company usually discovers two things at once: the Polish enforceability clause has no force in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian procedure that replaces it is shorter on paper than it proves in practice. The procedure itself is well established. What decides the outcome is a small number of questions that the Ukrainian court asks about the Polish proceedings, several of which are best answered before the claim in Poland is even filed. This note, written for foreign counsel, sets out those questions as Ukrainian courts have actually answered them, including in recent decisions of the Supreme Court.

In short: A Polish judgment is enforced in Ukraine under the 1993 bilateral treaty, not under EU law: the creditor files directly with the local court at the debtor’s seat, which does not review the merits. The case usually turns on two conditions, whether the Polish court was competent under Article 33 of the Treaty and whether the debtor was properly summoned under Polish law, and on paperwork that is easy to get wrong. Courts usually convert the award into hryvnias, and the proceeds cannot currently be transferred out of Ukraine.

Because Ukraine is outside the EU and outside the Lugano Convention, none of the European instruments a Polish lawyer would reach for first applies. The basis is the Treaty between Ukraine and the Republic of Poland on Legal Assistance and Legal Relations in Civil and Criminal Matters of 24 May 1993, in force since 14 August 1994. Under Article 49 the two states recognise and enforce each other’s judgments in civil matters, and Ukrainian courts have consistently treated commercial disputes between companies as civil matters for this purpose. Article 52 leaves the procedure to the law of the state of enforcement, which in Ukraine means Articles 462–470 of the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC).

The Treaty is far from a dead letter. Speaking at a conference marking its thirtieth anniversary, as the Supreme Court reported on 3 April 2023, Judge Yuliia Cherniak of the Supreme Court described it as still one of the most frequently invoked instruments in Ukrainian cases with a foreign element, and stressed that it sets clear limits to recognition together with an exhaustive list of grounds for refusal. Between 2012 and February 2023, Polish courts sent 256 applications for recognition and enforcement and 826 requests for service and the taking of evidence to Ukraine under the Treaty (Supreme Court, 3 April 2023).

Three features of that procedure matter most to a foreign creditor. The application is heard by the local court at the debtor’s registered seat (Article 464 CPC), so a Kyiv debtor means one of Kyiv’s ten district courts, depending on where the debtor is registered. This is a local court of general jurisdiction applying the Code of Civil Procedure, not a commercial court, even where the underlying dispute was purely commercial. Unlike some of Ukraine’s other bilateral treaties, the Polish treaty allows the creditor to file directly with that court (Article 51), without routing the application through the Polish court of first instance and the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice. And the court’s review is confined to the conditions listed in Articles 50 and 51 of the Treaty: it does not revisit the merits. Arbitral awards, including those of Polish arbitral institutions, follow a different route: they are recognised under the New York Convention, and the application is heard at first instance by the Kyiv Court of Appeal (enforcement of foreign arbitral awards in Ukraine; for a recent example, see our note on enforcing a Chinese arbitral award in Ukraine).

The last point is not merely theoretical. When a Kyiv debtor objected to the recognition of a judgment of the District Court (Sąd Rejonowy) in Opole by arguing that it had in fact performed the carriage contract in dispute, the Desnianskyi District Court of Kyiv dismissed the objection as irrelevant to the grounds for refusal and granted leave to enforce (ruling of 22 July 2022, case No. 754/3416/22). The Supreme Court has also placed the burden of proving a ground for refusal on the debtor, not on the creditor (Resolution of 11 July 2022, case No. 761/11623/17; repeated in Resolution of 29 October 2025, case No. 521/13284/24). In practice the contest therefore turns on two of the Treaty’s conditions, which the debtor will scrutinise with some care.

Article 50(2) requires that the court which gave the judgment was competent under the Treaty itself, not merely under Polish law. For contractual claims the relevant rule is Article 33. Its second paragraph confers jurisdiction on the courts of the state where the defendant has its seat; the courts of the claimant’s state are competent only if the subject matter of the dispute or the defendant’s property is located there. Its third paragraph allows the parties to the contract to change that allocation by agreement.

The test is narrower than the one a Polish court applies when it accepts a claim against a foreign defendant, where the place of performance may be enough. A Polish judgment against a Kyiv company can therefore be entirely regular in Poland and still be exposed in Ukraine. The risk is sharpest for the most common commercial claim, an unpaid price: the debtor will argue that a claim for money has no location of its own and that it holds no assets in Poland.

That is precisely how the debtor argued in the longest Polish recognition case in recent Ukrainian practice. A Warsaw company obtained a default judgment of the Regional Court (Sąd Okręgowy) in Kraków in 2016 for some PLN 182,000 and USD 3,300, with interest and costs; the Kyiv debtor resisted recognition through three rounds of proceedings and three visits to the Supreme Court. The creditor prevailed in 2022, but not because the Ukrainian courts accepted that a money claim is located in Poland. It prevailed because the parties’ lease agreement of 2008 contained a clause naming the Kraków courts, and because the debtor, having received the claim, had never contested jurisdiction in Poland or appealed the judgment (Supreme Court, 11 July 2022, case No. 761/11623/17). The debtor’s broader argument was left undecided.

There is, however, an indication of how it might be answered. In a 2017 dispute between a Ukrainian company and its Polish counterparty, the High Commercial Court held that Article 33 prevails over the Ukrainian Private International Law Act, gave effect to a clause choosing the Polish courts, and declined jurisdiction. In doing so it observed that the second sentence of Article 33(2), which ties the claimant’s courts to the location of the subject matter, could operate in the sense the first-instance court had given it only where the claim is for the recovery of a debt or another property claim, and not for the invalidity of a contract (Resolution of 28 November 2017, case No. 910/10109/16). The remark was made in passing and concerned Ukrainian rather than Polish jurisdiction, but it supports a Polish creditor who argues that a claim for payment can be located in Poland. The stakes are real: Ukrainian courts do refuse enforcement where the foreign court lacked competence under a treaty test, as the Leninskyi District Court of Mykolaiv and the Court of Appeal of Mykolaiv Region did in 2018 for a judgment of the Arbitrazh Court of the Yaroslavl Region, applying the CIS Kyiv Agreement of 1992, from which Ukraine has since withdrawn by a law adopted on 12 January 2023, and the Supreme Court upheld the refusal (Resolution of 15 May 2019, case No. 489/5840/17). The 2022 resolution in the Kraków case cites this decision under the date 15 September 2019, a misprint: the proceedings number it gives, 61-36450св18, is that of the resolution of 15 May 2019.

The practical lesson is simple to state and easy to neglect. A written jurisdiction clause in favour of the Polish courts is the most reliable protection, because Article 33(3) gives it direct effect, and counsel should place that clause before the Ukrainian court together with evidence that the judgment rests on the contract containing it. Where there is no clause, the creditor should establish, before filing, whether the goods, the services or any assets of the debtor were in Poland, and whether the debtor took part in the Polish proceedings without objecting. Article 50(6) adds a less frequently litigated condition: the Polish court must have applied the law designated by the Treaty, which for contracts is the law of the place where the contract was concluded unless the parties chose another.

Holding a Polish judgment against a Ukrainian company? Send us the judgment and the service record — we will tell you how it will fare on competence and notice before you file.

The second condition the debtor will test is Article 50(3): a party that did not take part in the proceedings must have received the summons in due time and in proper form. Under Article 51(2)(2) the creditor must prove this with a document showing service in accordance with the law of the state where the judgment was given. Ukrainian courts therefore judge service by Polish procedural law, not by Ukrainian law.

This has a consequence that Polish counsel may find reassuring, although it took the Ukrainian courts some time to reach it. Under Article 1135⁵ of the Polish Code of Civil Procedure, a party with no domicile, habitual residence or seat in Poland or another EU Member State must appoint an agent for service in Poland unless it has a Poland-resident litigation representative (§ 1); if it does not, court documents are left in the case file with the effect of service, and the party must be warned of this at the first service (§ 2). When a creditor sought recognition of a default judgment of the Regional Court in Radom against a Ukrainian debtor, the Lviv courts twice refused for lack of proper notice. The Supreme Court set the appellate ruling aside because the appellate court had not answered the creditor’s argument based on that rule and had overlooked that the Lviv court’s own file on executing the Polish request for service showed that court documents had repeatedly been handed to the debtor’s representative (Resolution of 19 August 2020). According to the creditor, the documents handed over in November 2014 warned the debtor of the rule and gave him one month to appoint an agent in Poland. In the second round the debtor argued that the summons for the final hearing of 16 December 2015 had reached his representative only on 17 December, and that Article 15 of the Hague Service Convention barred a default judgment in those circumstances. The Supreme Court rejected both points: the debtor had known of the Polish proceedings since November 2014, the Polish rule on deemed service applied as the law of the court of origin, and he had therefore not been deprived of the opportunity to take part (Resolution of 16 February 2022, case No. 461/8156/17). The Radom judgment was given in December 2015; the Supreme Court finally confirmed leave to enforce more than six years later. What the Ukrainian court looks for is evidence that the defendant knew of the case and had a real opportunity to defend itself, and a warning of this kind, served through the Treaty channel together with the Polish court’s documents, is the best evidence of it.

The Kraków case shows where the weak point usually lies. The summons for a hearing fixed for 15 April 2015 was handed to the debtor’s representative by a Kyiv court, executing the Polish request, only on 10 July 2015, three months after the hearing date. The first Kyiv judge refused recognition for lack of proper notice. The appellate court and the Supreme Court took a different view, because the default judgment was given only in February 2016, the debtor had by then held 33 pages of court documents for seven months without reacting, and the file contained confirmations of service sent by the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice together with a certificate of the presiding Polish judge, issued under Article 1144¹ of the Polish Code, that the defendant had been duly summoned (Supreme Court, 12 September 2018, upholding the Kyiv Court of Appeal’s remittal, and 11 July 2022). Those documents carried the day; without them, the first-instance refusal might well have stood.

Time should also be built into the Polish proceedings. Service between Poland and Ukraine runs through the Treaty and the Agreement between the two Ministries of Justice of 10 January 2011, under which Ukrainian regional justice departments and the presidents of Polish regional courts communicate directly (Articles 1 and 2 of the Agreement); the Treaty also allows bilingual forms to be used for requests (Article 6(3)). Current Ukrainian commercial court practice in the opposite direction gives a sense of the pace: in one case filed in February 2026, proof of service on the Polish defendant arrived in July 2026 (Commercial Court of Khmelnytskyi Region, case No. 924/149/26); in another, filed in April 2025, there was still no proof of service in September 2026 (case No. 924/362/25); a third court, opening proceedings in July 2026, fixed the first hearing for February 2027 (Commercial Court of Vinnytsia Region, case No. 902/947/26). A Polish court that sets hearing dates without allowing for intervals of this order risks producing exactly the gap the debtor will later invoke.

The quality of the Polish request matters as much as its timing. In September 2026 a district court in the Kyiv region put off deciding whether to accept a Polish request for service, because the documents did not allow the addressee to be identified, her place of residence established or the court’s territorial competence verified, and requested identifying data from the Ministry of Justice’s interregional department (Bohuslav District Court, ruling of 21 September 2026, case No. 358/1956/26). For a corporate defendant, the request should carry the company’s full name in Ukrainian, its EDRPOU registration code and its registered address as shown in the Ukrainian state register.

A foreign judgment may be presented for enforcement in Ukraine within three years of the date on which it became final (Article 463 CPC). The period can be restored under the general rule of Article 127 CPC if the creditor shows good reasons for missing it, but a recent Supreme Court decision illustrates how expensive that route is. A Lithuanian creditor whose Vilnius judgment for more than USD 4 million became final in 2018 filed in Odesa in 2021 within time, only to see three successive applications left without consideration: first because the authority of the director who signed was not documented, then because translators had rendered the company’s legal form in two different ways, so that the applicant appeared to be a different entity from the judgment creditor. Leave to enforce was granted, with the period restored, only in December 2024 and upheld by the Supreme Court in October 2025 (case No. 521/13284/24). The Lithuanian treaty differs from the Polish one in procedure, but the formal lessons transfer without adjustment.

Under Article 51 of the Treaty and Article 466 CPC, the application should be accompanied by a certified copy of the judgment with confirmation that it is final and enforceable (the Polish certificate of finality and the enforceability clause serve this purpose); proof of service on a defendant who did not take part; a document confirming the representative’s authority, together with a current extract from the National Court Register showing who may sign for the creditor; information on any partial payment; and certified translations into Ukrainian of the application and all of these documents. If the application is filed electronically, the originals or duly certified copies must reach the court before the hearing, or the application will be returned.

Two formal points deserve attention. Documents issued or certified by a Polish court need neither legalisation nor an apostille (Article 15 of the Treaty). Translations are a different matter: Article 5 of the Treaty accepts translations by an official translator whose signature is officially certified or by a sworn translator of either state, yet Ukrainian courts habitually require translations bearing a notarially certified translator’s signature, and the cost of that step should be budgeted from the outset. The creditor’s name, legal form and registration number should also be rendered identically in every document and every translation; it is a small discipline that, as the Lithuanian case shows, can save years.

Actual duration depends almost entirely on whether the debtor resists and whether the file gives it something to resist with. The Opole creditor mentioned above filed in May 2022, in the first months of the full-scale invasion, and obtained leave to enforce in July 2022. The Kraków creditor filed in April 2017 and obtained a final decision in July 2022. Between those two cases lies the difference between a complete file and a contested one. Ukrainian courts have continued to function throughout martial law, with electronic filing and remote participation available, and wartime conditions have not in themselves been the source of delay in the cases reviewed here.

Because the debtor learns of the application at the outset, a creditor concerned about dissipation should ask for interim measures, such as an attachment of the debtor’s bank accounts, together with the application. Articles 466 and 467 CPC allow the court to grant them at any stage of the recognition proceedings where their absence could make enforcement difficult or impossible.

Article 467(8) CPC instructs the court to state a foreign-currency award in hryvnias at the National Bank of Ukraine rate on the date of the ruling, and district courts routinely do so: the Opole judgment for PLN 34,643 was recognised as UAH 270,967.15, and the Kraków judgment was converted in the same way. For the creditor this fixes the exchange rate at the date of recognition and leaves it to bear any later depreciation, which in Ukraine has rarely been a trivial risk.

In June 2026 the Supreme Court took a different line. Recognising the costs order in an Italian judgment, it struck out the hryvnia equivalent that the first-instance court had added, holding that such a conversion in effect alters the operative part of the foreign judgment and does not accord with the way debts expressed in foreign currency are enforced (Resolution of 17 June 2026, case No. 495/8640/21). The resolution does not engage expressly with Article 467(8), and it is too early to say that practice has settled. A creditor’s counsel should nevertheless ask for recognition in the currency of the judgment and cite this resolution, with conversion as the fallback.

The more serious constraint lies outside the courtroom. Since February 2022, Resolution No. 18 of the Board of the National Bank of Ukraine has restricted cross-border transfers of funds (see also OstApp Journal, May 2025). Its current version contains no general exception for transfers made to execute court decisions in favour of foreign creditors; the only enforcement-specific exception covers sums recovered from the State and wholly state-owned entities (point 14, sub-point 47). Whether proceeds can leave Ukraine therefore depends on the underlying transaction: payment for imported goods, including contractual penalties and damages (sub-point 2), and payments under lease and rental agreements (sub-point 24) are permitted, while most claims for services are not covered. Whether a bank will process money recovered by an enforcement officer under these sub-points is not regulated and should be checked with the bank. A Polish creditor whose claim falls outside the permitted categories can obtain recognition and collect from a Ukrainian debtor, but cannot, for the time being, transfer the proceeds to Poland. This does not make recognition pointless: it allows enforcement measures to be taken against the debtor’s assets before they disappear and preserves the creditor’s position while the currency regime evolves. It does mean that the decision to proceed should be taken with this limitation in view, and that the state of the restrictions should be checked again when the application is filed.

Not sure whether recognition is worth it while proceeds cannot leave Ukraine? Tell us what the debtor owns — we will say which enforcement steps make sense now.

Since 1 September 2023 the Hague Convention of 2 July 2019 on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters has been in force between Ukraine and the European Union, Poland included. It applies where the proceedings in the state of origin were instituted on or after that date (Article 16). Its jurisdictional filters are in some respects more generous to a creditor than Article 33 of the 1993 Treaty: it accepts a judgment on a contractual obligation given by the courts of the state where the obligation was or should have been performed under the parties’ agreement or, failing that, the law applicable to the contract, unless the defendant’s activities clearly had no purposeful and substantial connection to that state (Article 5(1)(g)), and a judgment against a defendant who argued on the merits without contesting jurisdiction (Article 5(1)(f)).

Whether a Polish creditor can rely on those filters in Ukraine is uncertain. Article 23(2) provides that the Convention does not affect the application of a treaty concluded before it, so the 1993 Treaty plainly continues to apply. Whether it applies exclusively, or whether the creditor may invoke the Convention where the Treaty test is harder to meet, is a question on which we are not aware of any Ukrainian decision. There is a respectable argument that “not affect” preserves the Treaty without excluding the Convention, supported by the compatible interpretation required by Article 23(1); there is an equally respectable argument that the earlier bilateral regime governs. For judgments in proceedings begun on or after 1 September 2023, where the Treaty’s jurisdiction test is doubtful, it is worth pleading the Convention in the alternative; it would be imprudent to build a strategy on it.

Domestic guidance points in both directions. In a resolution that has never been formally revoked, the Plenum of the Supreme Court of Ukraine instructed courts as long ago as 1999 that, where states are bound by both multilateral and bilateral instruments on legal assistance, the instrument that entered into force later should apply (Resolution No. 12 of 24 December 1999), an approach that mirrors the later-in-time rule in Article 30 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969. Read on its own, that approach would favour the 2019 Convention. But under Article 30(2) of the Vienna Convention, where a treaty specifies that it is subject to, or is not to be considered incompatible with, an earlier treaty, the earlier treaty prevails, and Article 23(2) of the 2019 Convention is a clause of that kind. The question therefore remains open, and a Ukrainian court asked to decide it would be doing so for the first time.

A second Hague instrument matters more at the drafting stage. The Convention of 30 June 2005 on Choice of Court Agreements, in force for the European Union since 1 October 2015 and for Ukraine since 1 August 2023 (HCCH status table), requires the courts of one Contracting State to recognise and enforce a judgment given by a court designated in an exclusive choice-of-court agreement, on narrowly defined grounds (Articles 8 and 9). Its temporal rules (Article 16) and its relationship with earlier treaties (Article 26) raise questions of their own, but for contracts concluded today an exclusive clause in favour of the Polish courts does double service: it satisfies Article 33(3) of the 1993 Treaty and brings the eventual judgment within the 2005 Convention.

Most of the risks described above are fixed by the time the Polish judgment is given, which is why the most useful review takes place before the application is drafted, and ideally before the Polish claim is filed. A creditor whose debtor and assets are both in Ukraine should also ask at the outset whether a claim before a Ukrainian commercial court would not reach the same result more directly than a Polish judgment followed by recognition. A Polish supplier took that route before the Commercial Court of Kyiv, which accepted jurisdiction under Article 33 as the court of the defendant’s seat and, in the same case, refused to defer to an arbitration clause referring to an “International Commercial Arbitration Court in Vienna”, holding that the clause did not give the exact name of the institution and therefore could not be performed (case No. 910/21362/16, judgment of 26 January 2017, upheld on appeal on 7 June 2017); the case is also a reminder of what an imprecise dispute clause can cost. The questions foreign counsel usually ask at that stage are collected in our note Suing a Ukrainian Company: 20 Questions Foreign Counsel Ask. Where the Polish route has already been taken, foreign counsel can usefully assemble the following before approaching a Ukrainian firm:

• the judgment with its certificate of finality and enforceability clause, and the date on which it became final;
• the contract on which the claim was based, with any jurisdiction clause marked;
• the full service record: the Polish court’s requests, the Ukrainian confirmations of service and, if the defendant did not appear, a certificate of the presiding judge that it was duly summoned;
• any procedural steps the debtor took in Poland, including objections or appeals;
• information on payments received and on the debtor’s assets, in Poland or in Ukraine;
• a current register extract for the creditor and a consistent rendering of its name for all translations.

With these documents, the questions that decide a Ukrainian recognition case can be answered in advance rather than discovered at the hearing. The remaining uncertainties, the currency in which the judgment will be recognised, the role of the 2019 Hague Convention and, above all, the transfer of proceeds out of Ukraine, are matters of law in motion, and a creditor is better served by knowing them before committing to the procedure than by learning them at its end.

See our pages on enforcement of foreign court judgments in Ukraine and cross-border debt recovery from Ukrainian companies. This note is not legal advice. Ukrainian law is stated as of October 22, 2026.