How Supreme Court judges ignored the falsification of sanctions documents against Poroshenko

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I promised a long read about the first instance decision in the Poroshenko vs. Zelensky case on sanctions. It is already clear that even a very long text will not fit all the interesting details, so we will cut the elephant into pieces.

Today we will analyze two elements of this puzzle :

• how the court reacted to the falsification of evidence by state authorities;
• what the court thinks about the impact of sanctions on the elections.

Because blocking accounts and prohibiting transactions as a sanction restriction excludes registration by a candidate due to the inability to provide the CEC with all the documents required by law. Therefore, the incumbent president can, through sanctions, remove any of his rivals from the elections – Poroshenko has already removed him, Zaluzhny and the new favorite Fedorov are waiting for their turn. It is already known that 3 out of 5 judges agreed with this and believe that this is how it should be, but are you curious how they explain it? I was curious.

Let’s start with falsifications. The Code of Administrative Procedure stipulates that state bodies to which a lawsuit has been filed must provide the court with everything relevant to the case (“a subject of public authority must submit to the court all documents and materials in its possession that can be used as evidence in the case” – Part 2 of Article 77). In our case, this was difficult from the very beginning. The NSDC refused to go to court at all (they always refuse in cases about sanctions, although formally it is their decision that is being appealed).

Grounds: The NSDC as such is not a legal entity and cannot participate in the process, the NSDC apparatus is a legal entity, but it does not make decisions on sanctions, so decide without us, your honor. The Supreme Court never insists, but at the beginning of each session, as part of the ritual, it asks all participants: in their opinion, can the consideration continue without the appearance of a NSDC representative? I don’t know what will happen if someone says “no”. We didn’t try, because what’s the point?

The Cabinet of Ministers does not participate in sanctions proceedings so often – because most sanctions are initiated by the SBU. In our case, the initiative came from the CMU, and they had to respond. In the first package of documents (all marked “for official use”), they provided the court with two versions of the draft order on sanctions dated February 12, 2025, both signed by the Minister of Economy Yulia Svyrydenko – the “original”, registered at 17:40, and “revised based on the comments at the CMU meeting” – registered at 19:47.

The lawyers of the Cabinet of Ministers did not bother to explain to the court that the “revised” version was actually created retrospectively, because the annexes to it were documents on approval from various ministries, which were received by the Ministry of Economy after 19:47, or even the next day. We had to extract this information over the next 6 months through tedious correspondence with individual ministries. When at the court hearing we asked to comment on the fact that, according to the Ministry of Justice’s response, the digital signature of the representative of Ukraine in the ECHR Margarita Sokorenko on the certificate of approval attached to the draft from 19:47 was placed at 22:17, we heard only “The Regulations of the Cabinet of Ministers do not prohibit the revision of orders in the working order” (in fact, it prohibits this).

But these are all minor hiccups. Then it got worse. Part of each project was a DVD with an electronic version of the documents. It is a bit archaic, but it makes sense, because the text of the final document should be created on the basis of the project, and in order not to type it manually, an electronic version is provided. The project from 17:40 was accompanied by a disk No. EN/10-25DSK, and the revised project from 19:47 – No. EN/11-25DSK. They were not immediately provided to the court, and in May the court ruled to demand them from the Cabinet of Ministers. The Cabinet of Ministers replied that it could not hand over the disks because they did not have them – disk No. EN/10-25DSK was returned to the Ministry of Economy, and the disk was further transferred to the National Security and Defense Council.

At that time, both the NSDC and the Ministry of Economy were formally involved as “third parties on the defendant’s side,” and both did not attend the hearing. The court, in a July hearing, slightly chided the CMU for its lack of enthusiasm for cooperation with the judiciary, and issued a new ruling on the recovery.

The defendant’s side tried to pretend for some time that it did not understand how to execute the resolutions, because the documents were marked “DSC”, and before submitting them to the court, it was necessary to obtain permission from the body that created them, which is difficult. The climax was the request of the CMU representative that the court demand the CMU transcript from the CMU secretariat – because the CMU “is not authorized to use the transcript of the CMU meeting outside its powers, as defined by the Constitution of Ukraine and the laws of Ukraine”. The court ignored this request, and we did not return to it.

When disk No. EN/11-25DSK finally arrived at the court, we saw (and the court saw in a closed session) that the files on this disk were created on February 13, 2025. According to the documents, it was the original of the same disk that was considered at the NSDC meeting between 7:47 PM and 8:40 PM on February 12. There was nothing else, no copy was created.

When asked how this happened, we heard the expected answer “probably a technical error”. No, it was not a technical error. The court was provided with a fake DVD, which was deliberately recorded the next day, February 13, when the media noticed that the published decree incorrectly indicated Poroshenko’s tax number, Medvedchuk’s citizenship and Zhevago’s year of birth. The decree includes 5 people – so the defect is 60%. What is done quickly is born blind.

Zelensky was already abroad at that time, and in any case, he definitely would not have wanted to admit a mistake and sign a decree on sanctions against Poroshenko a second time. The OP, the CMU, and the NSDC panicked, and could not think of anything better than to simply change the text of the already signed decree with incorrect data to the correct one. A lot of people were involved. The NSDC wrote a letter to the OP “we are sending a revised version of the appendix, please return the appendix to the decision sent by letter dated 02/12/2025 without consideration.”

An extraordinary issue of the “Official Gazette of the President of Ukraine” was published on February 14 (it is published twice a month, the previous one was on February 5, the next one was supposed to be on the 20th) – only to later say that the publication on the official website of the President of Ukraine with the wrong appendix was “unofficial”, the first publication in the “Official Gazette” took place with the correct data – “what was quickly lifted is considered as if it did not fall”. Fire in a brothel during a flood.

Part of this fuss was the replacement of disk No. EN/11-25DSK. Maybe it wasn’t even a physical replacement of a disk for a disk, because it’s not a fact at all that any version of disk No. EN/11-25DSK existed before February 13, 2025. But there was definitely a deception of the court.

On disk No. EN/10-25DSK there was a file “Appendix 4 PERSONS.xls” created on February 12, 2025 at 17:06. A table with 4 lines: 1 – Kolomoisky, 2 – Bogolyubov, 3 – Zhevago, 4 – Poroshenko.

It was not drawn up according to the rules, which the Ministry of Justice later pointed out in a comment: “The Ministry of Justice of Ukraine reported the absence in paragraph 4 of the appendix to the draft order of the surname, first name of the person to whom sanctions are proposed to be applied, in Latin letters… there are no specific wordings of the types of sanctions” – that is, in human language: instead of “Poroshenko Petro Oleksiyovych” it should be “Poroshenko Petro Oleksiyovych [Poroshenko Petro], and instead of “Types of sanctions (restrictions) applied: [24]” it should be in capital letters “[24] deprivation of state awards of Ukraine, other forms of honor. It is easy to see that these comments were taken into account in the revised version. However, if you believe Svyrydenko’s signature, they were taken into account at 19:47, and arrived, as already mentioned, only after 22:17.

But the main thing that gives away a fake is not the difference in time, but the difference in content. And this is a little detective within a detective. At a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers, at which the first, “unfinished version” was considered, the head of the SBU, Vasyl Malyuk, made an unexpected proposal “regarding the inclusion of Medvedchuk V. V. in the list of sanctioned persons, applying sanctions to him indefinitely.” No one was ready for this.

On the one hand, Medvedchuk is supposedly an oligarch, and his inclusion in the decree “against the main oligarchs” corresponds to the legend (I hope everyone understands that this is a legend, and the main idea there is in the “amalgam” to hide the main goal – to squeeze Poroshenko out of politics – under the phrases “not everything is so clear, are you against sanctions against Kolomoisky?”). Therefore, no one objected to such a proposal from the SBU.

On the other hand, nothing was ready for such a “revision”, and there was no time, the CMU meeting began at 6 pm, the NSDC meeting was scheduled for 6:30 pm. You can’t write in the documents “sanctions on Medvedchuk for life, because he is Medvedchuk”, you need some justification, which was not at hand. Medvedchuk was already under sanctions at that time repeatedly. Only two and a half months later, in November 2024, Zelensky signed Decree No. 779/2024, which deprived Medvedchuk of state awards. What should be written as a reason in the new decree?

In addition, although Vasyl Malyuk is certainly a determined person, he is not an expert on sanctions. And he is not aware that, for good reason, indefinite sanctions almost never happen. They happen for 50 years, but indefinite ones almost never. This is a well-established legal construction for protection before the ECHR, the Supreme Court approved it – in response to each lawsuit to lift sanctions, lawyers from the Office of the President write that the sanctions were applied “temporarily, for a clearly defined period” – and therefore the balance of interests of the state and the citizen has been maintained. It seems that indefinite sanctions do not work. And for Medvedchuk, indefinite sanctions are the best chance to win in the ECHR.

But it was impossible not to take into account the opinion of the SBU head, supported by the members of the Cabinet of Ministers. Those members of the Cabinet of Ministers who were also members of the National Security and Defense Council moved from the Cabinet of Ministers building to Hrushevsky Street to the President’s Office, because the NSDC meeting was already starting. And the employees of the Ministry of Economy, which is located in the CMU building, remained on Hrushevsky Street and began to “finalize” the project in turbo mode, according to Malyuk.

If these people had even a little more time, they would see that there is no need to invent anything at night. The justification for Poroshenko’s sanctions clearly stated: “The pre-trial investigation established that Petro Oleksiyovych Poroshenko, while holding the position of President of Ukraine, acted in prior collusion with Medvedchuk V.V…”.

In paragraphs 1 and 2 of the same draft (Kolomoysky and Bogolyubov), the text of the justification is generally identical: “It has been established that a citizen of the State of Israel, Kolomoysky Ihor Valeriyovych (born February 13, 1963) and a citizen of Ukraine, Bogolyubov Gennady Borisovich (born January 20, 1962), through a number of offshore companies controlled by them…” – and then what they did together, according to the investigation. There was nothing easier than copying the text of the justification from the section on Poroshenko and pasting it into the section on Medvedchuk. It was even elegant, no one would have guessed that it was not planned this way from the very beginning.

But there was no time to think, and another text appeared in Medvedchuk’s section, where there was no place for “Medvedchuk’s partner” Poroshenko at all: “Former Head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, Head of the “Ukrainian Choice – People’s Right” organization, and Head of the Political Council of the banned in Ukraine party “Opposition Platform – For Life”. The former People’s Deputy of Ukraine, on the instructions of representatives of the Russian state authorities, collected information about the locations of the deployment of Ukrainian military formations and their combat training, and also implemented measures to block the launch of advanced cellular radio technologies in Ukraine…” – and so on. The only way I can personally explain this is that they copied the text from some previous decree on sanctions, which was quickly found. If this is really so, then Medvedchuk is under sanctions twice for the same thing, and for the ECHR it will simply be like a red mule to a bull.

Instead, the set of sanctions was just copied from others in the same project – and here it also didn’t work out very well, because Medvedchuk was deprived of all state awards by sanctions in November 2024. Why deprive him of them again in February 2025? Maybe Zelensky managed to award him again in the meantime?

But these are not our problems. It’s time for us to go to Bankova Street for the National Security and Defense Council meeting.

The court was not provided with a transcript of the NSDC meeting (the secretariat claims that it does not exist at all), and for now we can only rely on what was recorded in the minutes. The minutes state: “SPEAKS: MALYUK V.V., who proposed replacing the numbers and the word “10 years” with the word “indefinitely”, which was supported by the members of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine present at the meeting. LYTVYNENKO O.V., ZELENSKYY BO, VLASYUK V.V. took part in the discussion.”

I have a version of what happened. Since there was no time to rework the first draft, they brought either this original version with handwritten edits to the NSDC meeting, or some intermediate version. Maybe Medvedchuk was there, but he, like everyone else, was offered sanctions for 10 years. One way or another, Malyuk did not see there that his proposal at the CMU meeting had been taken into account. And he took the floor again. If he had insisted that the sanctions against Kolomoisky, Bogolyubov, Zhevago and Poroshenko should also be indefinite, he could have said so earlier at the Cabinet of Ministers. Judging by everything, no one except Medvedchuk was interested in him at that moment. We do not know what Vlasyuk, Litvinenko and Zelensky had to say. But it all ended with the sanctions becoming indefinite for all five, which, judging by the minutes, Malyuk did not propose.

In any case, the DVD that was submitted to the court in August 2025 as disk No. EN/11-25DSK was definitely not considered at the NSDC meeting. It was supposedly submitted to the NSDC together with the original paper copy of Order No. 109-r signed by Shmyhal. But the NSDC registration mark on it is February 13. Upon our request, the NSDC confirmed: that’s right, February 13, and not that same evening after midnight, but at 11:13 p.m. on February 13. More than a day after Zelensky signed the decree.
When we asked the CMU representative about this at the meeting, he insisted that this was exactly what happened: at 7:56 PM, the CMU secretariat sent an order to the National Security and Defense Council with the courier service (this is how I personally learned that Ukraine still officially has a courier service, maybe there are still horse grenadiers and life guards hiding somewhere). The representative of the Cabinet of Ministers does not know why the document was registered by the National Security and Defense Council so late, it is not the fault of the Cabinet of Ministers.

– Does the field marshal get a receipt?

– Most likely, yes.

– Do you have this receipt?

– None.

Considering all that has been said, there is only one possible explanation. The appendices to the Cabinet of Ministers’ Order No. 109-r of February 12, 2025, as well as the appendices to the drafts of this order, were made already on February 13. The time of creation of the file “Appendix 4 PERSONS with types of sanctions.xls” on disk No. ЭН/11-25ДСК (in fact, there are already 5 persons with Medvedchuk there) – 17:14 February 13, 2025 – not a technical error, but the truth.

The people who forged this file (the metadata indicates that the author was Yaroslva Maksymenko, at that time the acting director of the sanctions policy department at the Ministry of Economy, who later moved to head ARMA; and the file was saved by Andriy Stadnytskyi, head of the department for improving and digitizing tools of the same department – but we do not know who was actually sitting at the computer at that moment. It will be the task of the investigation to find out) made one mistake typical of novice criminals.

The document simultaneously contains the initial 10-year sanctions for everyone except Medvedchuk – and corrected personal data (Poroshenko’s tax code is correct, Zhevago’s year of birth is 1974, Medvedchuk does not have Ukrainian citizenship). This file could never have existed in this form – neither on February 12 nor on February 13.

On February 12, no one had yet noticed any errors in the personal data. The decree with the errors was published on the websites of the President and the National Security and Defense Council on February 13 after 10:08, and it remained there for almost a day until the next morning. The first media publications about the errors, and that they question the validity of the decree, appeared on February 13 after 14:13, when journalist Maksym Savchuk wrote about it. Until that moment, no one in the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of Ministers, and the National Security and Defense Council knew that there had been a mess.

On the other hand, the fact that Medvedchuk’s sanctions term is indicated in the file on disk No. EN/11-25DSK as “indefinite; indefinite” (the first refers to the deprivation of state awards, which can only be indefinite regardless of the terms of other restrictions), and for all others as “indefinite; 10 years” – excludes the possibility that the document could have been an honest attempt to bring the text into line with the actually voted decision of the NSDC – in which case absolutely all sanctions for all persons would already be indefinite.

Yes, this DVD is a deliberate forgery, it was created on February 13, 2025 after 17:14 and transferred to the National Security and Defense Council by 23:13 as the original package of documents, allegedly sent at 19:56 on February 12. This simultaneously excludes the possibility of speaking about compliance with the legal procedure, and confirms that what happened was what the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court calls “arbitrariness” in the legal sense – the decision was “unfounded, discriminatory or adopted for a purpose other than that established by law. No one engages in falsifications to protect a legal and reasoned decision.

Now that you know what the court knew on this topic, you might be interested to see how the court commented on all of this in the decision? In particular, in the closed part, where the materials marked “DSK” are analyzed.

Thus: 59. On 12.02.2025 at 19:47, the Ministry of Economy sent to the Cabinet of Ministers a revised draft resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers “On the introduction of proposals for the application of personal special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions)”, to which was also attached an explanatory note dated 12.02.2025 No. 104-DSK on 3 (three) sheets, a certificate of approval on 2 (two) sheets, information and reference materials on 19 (nineteen) sheets, a DVD dated 12.02.2025 No. ЭН/11-25 DSK (volume DSK, p. 14-36).

148. Having analyzed the case materials (volume DSK, a.s. 6—36, 39-42, 46-48, 90-108), including electronic media – DVDs No. ЭН/10-25ДСК and No. ЭН/11-25ДСК (volume DSK, a.s. 88, 115), the Court established that the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine and the CMU collected information about the plaintiff in accordance with their powers defined by the Law of Ukraine “On the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine” dated 27.02.2014 No. 794 VII, the Law of Ukraine “On Prevention and Counteraction to the Legalization (Laundering) of Proceeds from Crime, Financing of Terrorism and Financing of the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction” dated 06.12.2019 No. 361-IX and the Regulation on the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine dated 07/29/2015 No. 537.

That’s all. The majority judges (Kashpur, Melnyk-Tomenko, Macedonska) mention the disk EN/11-25DSK simply as one of the materials that does not confirm anything unusual, except that our president is doing well, and that everything happened according to the law and procedure.

The court showed no signs of indignation that they had been given an obvious forgery and were being lied to in plain sight. They were not interested in who created it and why. Just like a stone in a swamp. When you already know the answer to the first question “what does the court think about forged evidence” it will be easier for you to guess what the court thinks about the president’s right to remove competitors from the elections with sanctions.

Yes, you guessed it. Doesn’t think anything.

The impact of the “ban on transactions” on the elections is not mentioned at all in the decision – it is also omitted in paragraph 40, which briefly sets out the arguments of the claim. It only mentions that, in the plaintiff’s opinion, the sanctions have the hidden purpose of persecuting him as a leader of the political opposition – and the majority of the court does not return to this topic any further.

Judge Smokovich’s separate opinion draws attention to the political context of the relationship between plaintiff Poroshenko and defendant Zelensky. Although the main motive for his disagreement with the majority is that Judge Smokovich considers the sanctions to be unfounded facts (and this is also true) – which removes other issues, because unfounded sanctions cannot be lawful by definition, regardless of other aspects.

For us, this separate opinion is important, as is the second separate opinion of Judge Radyshevska – which also agrees, regarding the factual unfoundedness of the NSDC decision. Two separate opinions in the Supreme Court decision in the case on the lifting of sanctions – this has never happened before. This is not football, where the score is 5:0, 4:1 or 3:2 – it is also a defeat. Our appeal has already been registered by the Grand Chamber, and the balance of votes there may turn out to be completely different. And if the consideration is, as we insist, open, the topic of falsifications, as well as the topic of restrictions on democratic procedures by sanctions, will be among the main ones there.

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