The ideologist behind the sanctions against the fifth president and leader of European Solidarity, Petro Poroshenko, was Andriy Portnov, and the presidential office implemented his concept.
The opposition leader stated this at a Supreme Court hearing.
“Two weeks before the sanctions announcements, I, as the leader of European Solidarity, and my political party, initiated a petition to have President Zelenskyy impose sanctions against the state criminal Portnov. This is a well-known fact; we made a corresponding statement in the Verkhovna Rada, and the petition quickly garnered the required 25,000 votes. We blocked it in the Presidential Office, and we blocked it in the government, but we registered it. We received a strange response from Ms. Sviridenko, the defendant in our case, stating that they saw no grounds for responding to the petition and imposing sanctions. At the same time, we received threats from Portnov that he would seek revenge and that sanctions would be imposed against me,” Poroshenko recalled.
“I emphasize that the government, the Presidential Office, and Mr. Yermak, in collaboration with Portnov, who visited the Presidential Office, coordinated efforts to impose sanctions. The documents provided by my defense attorneys are merely evidence that completely matches the false arguments used by Portnov and were published on the Presidential Office’s Telegram channels,” Petro Poroshenko stated.
“On February 13, immediately after the National Security and Defense Council meeting, during a visit to the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant, Zelenskyy, standing next to Galushchenko, a Minditchgate participant dismissed from the government, noted that the sanctions were due to Poroshenko’s siphoning off billions. For eleven months now, they’ve been thrashing around here, and we haven’t heard a word about billions,” the fifth President remarked.
“Therefore, I have only two theories. Either Portnov, Yermak, and Pronin misled the defendant, or they dragged him into this crime and he is an accomplice. I sincerely hope we have the former theory. The evidence presented to you is irrefutable. Therefore, neither Svyrydenko, nor the National Security and Defense Council, nor Yermak found grounds for imposing sanctions against Portnov. There are no grounds for imposing sanctions against the man who is the main organizer of the Maidan shootings, but there are for Poroshenko. And for a year now, they have been unable to present any grounds to the court,” Poroshenko emphasized.
Today, a panel of judges of the Cassation Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court continues its hearing of Petro Poroshenko’s lawsuit against President Zelenskyy to overturn the illegal decree imposing sanctions. Representatives of diplomatic missions, journalists, and members of parliament are present in the courtroom.
Poroshenko’s lawyers have added documents to the case file proving the identical wording in publications about Poroshenko on resources linked to Portnov, in the corresponding petition , which did not receive the necessary votes, and in the justification for sanctions in President Zelenskyy’s decree.
The court also included in the case file the ECHR’s decision of October 16, 2025, which found that sanctioned individuals in Ukraine lack adequate opportunities to protect their rights and due procedural guarantees against arbitrariness during judicial review of sanctions decisions. The ECHR noted that this decision is important for upholding constitutional guarantees as a component of the rule of law, property rights, and effective judicial protection in Ukraine.
Representatives of Zelenskyy and the Cabinet of Ministers attempted to object to the inclusion of the ECHR decision in the case file, but the court upheld Poroshenko’s motion.
At previous Supreme Court hearings, evidence of falsified sanctions against Poroshenko was examined. Poroshenko’s lawyers showed a film produced by the 1+1 television channel in which Zelenskyy openly admitted that the National Security and Defense Council is his weapon and that he uses it. He claimed this is because it’s more effective than following the law. The president’s representative in court urged that interviews and public statements by the president be disregarded, as they, she argued, do not determine the court’s position on the sanctions against Poroshenko.
At a closed court hearing, the panel of judges reviewed documents marked “for official use only,” which served as the basis for the National Security and Defense Council’s decision. According to lawyer Ilya Novikov, the documents provide no adequate explanation as to why the authorities urgently needed to impose sanctions against the fifth president within a matter of hours. Furthermore, he noted that some of the documents provided by the defendants were falsified. In the closed portion of the hearing, government representatives also stated that the sanctions against Poroshenko were imposed for educational purposes.
Earlier, President Zelenskyy’s representative to the Supreme Court acknowledged that changes were made to the signed decree implementing the National Security and Defense Council’s decision on sanctions against Poroshenko, which she called “technical amendments.”
As attorney Ihor Golovan previously reported, the Vinnytsia District Administrative Court’s ruling on Petro Poroshenko’s lawsuit against the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) staff and the NSDC Secretary entered into force on July 31. “In particular, it was established that the Decree and its appendix, which was sent for the president’s signature and dated February 12, 2025, contained errors. Specifically, Petro Poroshenko’s identification code contained 11 digits instead of 10. Accordingly, the court established that the President had enacted the Decree.” The court also noted that current Ukrainian legislation does not provide for the possibility of correcting errors or amending regulatory legal acts, including decisions of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine and presidential decrees, outside the established procedure for adopting the relevant act.
President Zelenskyy’s spokesperson also confirmed earlier during the meeting that the National Bank of Ukraine illegally imposed financial restrictions on Petro Poroshenko.