Litigating in a Ukrainian Court: What to Expect, and What Twelve Years of Reform Changed

Cross-border disputes | JVS Law

On 8 April 2014 Ukraine passed a statute called the Law “On the Restoration of Trust in the Judiciary in Ukraine” No. 1188-VII. The title is the whole problem in five words. It is still formally in force today.

The question our partner asked at the time — in print, in the legal press — was whether trust can be restored by legislation at all. Twelve years later the answer is visible, and it matters to anyone deciding where a dispute with a Ukrainian counterparty will be heard.

Anna Tsirat’s piece did not argue about doctrine. It listed what a litigator sees between nine in the morning and the moment a case is called.

Hearings beginning thirty minutes to two hours after the listed time — not as an incident, as the rule. Cause lists allotting between five and thirty minutes per case: can a file of seven volumes be decided justly in thirty minutes? Two to fifteen matters listed for the same slot, so that a party’s day is gone either way. Corridors with too few chairs to sit on and, in more than one court, no working facilities to speak of.

Then the substance. Judges opening the file for the first time in the hearing room — normal practice, she wrote, in the administrative and commercial courts. On appeal and in cassation, one judge who has read the case and two who visibly have not. Court websites listing the surnames of judges and nothing else: no photograph, no university, no career. Can you trust an anonym?

The conclusion was not that judges are corrupt. It was that trust is a function of whether procedure is actually followed — the principles written into every procedural code: rule of law, equality of arms, adversarial hearing, open establishment of the facts, a reasoned and appealable decision. Where any of them is not delivered, trust falls, and no statute with a reassuring title changes that.

Her proposal was equally unromantic: that lawyers should write, publicly and by name, about how specific proceedings were conducted and which principle was missed. Not to condemn — to make the record visible.

A great deal, at the top of the pyramid, and it is worth saying plainly.

The Constitution was amended on the justice chapter — Law No. 1401-VIII of 2 June 2016, in force from 30 September 2016 — and a new Law on the Judiciary and the Status of Judges No. 1402-VIII was adopted the same day.

A new Supreme Court began work on 15 December 2017, the date fixed by Plenum Resolution No. 2 of 30 November 2017. On that day the old Supreme Court and the three high specialised courts stopped. The three procedural codes were rewritten in the same cycle — what that did, and did not do, for cross-border cases is a separate story.

And the “anonym” complaint has an answer, although it is older than the complaint. Under the Law on Access to Court Decisions of 22 December 2005, every judgment goes into the Unified State Register of Court Decisions. You cannot see your judge’s photograph. You can read every decision they have written. For a party choosing whether to litigate, the second is worth considerably more, and almost nobody uses it before filing.

None of the reform reached the thing the 2014 article was actually about: how many minutes a judge has for your case.

On 1 June 2026 the High Council of Justice set the number of judicial posts in the local and appellate courts for 2026 at 6,880. In the same decision, the State Judicial Administration’s advisory opinion puts the normative need at 11,539. The system is being planned, openly and on the record, at three-fifths of what it says it needs — the shortfall attributed to what the budget allows, with full staffing pushed out to 2028.

That number is the corridor. It is why hearings start late, why a file is opened at the bench, why a matter that should take one hearing takes four. It is not a scandal and nobody is hiding it; it is arithmetic, and it will still be arithmetic after the next reform.

The 2014 statute, meanwhile, is still on the books, in a version dated 31 March 2023. Twelve years of a law named after a thing it could not deliver is, in its way, the cleanest confirmation of the original argument.

The practical conclusion is narrower than “avoid Ukrainian courts”, and more useful.

Where you can choose, choose deliberately. An arbitration clause moves the merits out of the queue entirely — that is its real value here, ahead of confidentiality or expertise. What it does not move is the enforcement stage: a foreign award still has to pass through a Ukrainian court before anything is seized, and that route has its own timetable.

Where you cannot choose, plan for the calendar rather than the code. Insolvency of a Ukrainian debtor, disputes over Ukrainian real estate, corporate disputes about a Ukrainian company, and enforcement itself all sit in the local courts whatever your contract says. The procedural deadlines in the codes are real; the listing practice is what determines your dates.

Read the judge before you file. The register is free and complete. An hour spent on how a particular bench has decided comparable matters tells you more about your prospects than any assessment of the reform.

• Is the subject matter one a Ukrainian court must hear? Insolvency, immovable property, corporate matters concerning a Ukrainian legal entity, and the enforcement stage — no clause changes those.
• If it is not — is there an arbitration clause, and does it survive scrutiny? A clause that names a non-existent institution or an ambiguous seat delivers you back to the court you were avoiding.
• Have you looked up the court and the judge in the register? Before filing, not after the first hearing.
• Have you budgeted three instances, not one? In practice the first-instance timetable is the beginning of the exercise.
• Is there anything to enforce against? The most robust judgment in the world is a document until it meets assets. That question belongs at the start of the case, not the end.

Based on the author’s article “Публичное осуждение”, first published in Yurydychna Praktyka, issue No. 19 (855), 2014, in the Tribune column. Rewritten and extended in August 2026 with what the reform delivered and what it did not; the law and the figures are stated as at that date.

The observations above are a litigator’s, made in the courts the author was appearing in at the time — which is why the piece is about listing practice and hearing rooms rather than about institutions. She also writes the Ukrainian national monograph on civil procedure for the International Encyclopaedia for Civil Procedure (Wolters Kluwer) — the same system described from the other end.