REUTERS
Ukraine's war with pro-Russian separatists may be frozen but the legal battle between Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko is just heating up, according to Bloomberg.
The $3 billion lawsuit Russia filed against Ukraine in London last week over a bond default is just a fraction of the $63 billion Ukraine is seeking in lawsuits and other legal claims from Stockholm to The Hague over Putin's annexation of Crimea. Russian gas exporter Gazprom PJSC, meanwhile, is demanding about $32 billion in unpaid bills, pushing total claims from both sides to almost $100 billion, Bloomberg wrote.
"It's a new phase of the standoff," said Otilia Dhand, a political analyst specializing in central and eastern Europe at Teneo Intelligence in Brussels.
The pivot from combat zones to courtrooms will ensure relations between the former Soviet neighbors remain tense for the foreseeable future, lawyers and officials from both countries said. Many of the cases may take years to resolve and cost tens of millions of dollars in legal fees alone.
And there's no guarantee that either side will be able to collect if it wins because that would entail hunting for state assets abroad, a complex, costly and time-consuming process in its own right, according to Stephen Jagusch, a partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP. Ukraine would have to get in line behind former owners of Yukos Oil Co., who won a $50 billion award against Russia in The Hague in 2014 for unlawful confiscation of assets, he said.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian companies (PrivatBank, Ukrnafta, Crimean-based airport Belbek, Stabil, Everest Estate, and state-run Oschadbank) have already filed six lawsuits against Russia, now pending in the Court of Arbitration in The Hague, regarding protection of their property in the Russian-occupied Crimea.
The lawsuits were filed based on the Ukrainian-Russian intergovernmental agreement on encouragement and mutual protection of investments.