What Russian Courts Actually Enforce: A Practical Map of the Arbitral Award Enforcement Architecture Post-2022

Since 2022, the conventional wisdom among Western counsel has been that enforcing foreign arbitral awards in Russia is not worth attempting. That advice is often correct. But it is becoming imprecise. Russian courts do enforce some foreign awards and refuse others, and the pattern of refusals and grants is not random.

Based on decisions handed down between 2024 and early 2026, identifiable criteria govern the outcome, and those criteria can be mapped. Russian courts apply the standard New York Convention framework: review is limited to the exhaustive grounds in Article V, and merits review is prohibited. The post-2022 development has been the expansion of the public policy exception into a screening mechanism that operates on structural features of the arbitration rather than the award’s content. The criteria mapped below are applications of that expanded public policy doctrine, operating alongside the separate procedural constraints of the Lugovoy Law discussed below.

The Ceiling: What Russian Courts Say They Are Doing

Two decisions frame the outer limits of the post-2022 enforcement architecture.

The first is the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling in the Thywissen case (No. 304-ЭС16524-2799, dated July 26, 2024), previously discussed on this blog, which involved a $600,000 FOSFA award against a Novosibirsk grain company. The tribunal was constituted in December 2021 (i.e. before February 2022). FOSFA had appointed the second arbitrator on behalf of the Russian party after it missed its nomination deadline, and all three arbitrators were nationals of what later became “unfriendly” states (Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Denmark). Both the Novosibirsk Commercial Court (August 2023) and the West Siberian Circuit Court (December 2023) had granted enforcement. The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the case to the first-instance court for new consideration on four grounds: that damages required merits review to ensure proportionality in civil liability; that the debtor’s regional significance warranted consideration; that arbitrators from “unfriendly” states should be presumed partial; and that the courts should have considered whether payment difficulties prevented access to justice. The ruling was a remand, not a final refusal. However, Thywissen withdrew its enforcement application with the lower court in September 2024.

The second boundary-setting decision is the Constitutional Court’s October 2025 ruling in Novitsky (No. 2615-O dated October 14, 2025), which arose from a challenge to Articles 248.1 and 248.2 of the Russian Commercial Procedure Code, the so-called Lugovoy Law (discussed here and here on the blog). Mr. Novitsky had guaranteed a share purchase agreement governed by English law with an LCIA arbitration clause. After the LCIA issued an award against him in June 2024, he sought to invoke Article 248.2 to block its enforcement, arguing that personal sanctions imposed by the US and Australia had prevented him from participating properly in the arbitral proceedings. The Russian courts rejected this objection, and he challenged the provisions before the Constitutional Court. The Court refused his challenge but used the occasion to establish that Articles 248.1 and 248.2 do not operate automatically: they require a fact-specific assessment of the actual impact of sanctions on both sides of the dispute, including whether the parties were in substantially different procedural conditions. The petitioner’s own conduct and the timing of any application are also relevant. The Constitutional Court thus set a ceiling on the use of the Lugovoy Law as a tool to resist enforcement of completed awards.

Together, Thywissen and Novitsky define the enforcement architecture, which is not a blanket prohibition. It requires courts to assess specific circumstances, and some of those assessments produce enforcement.

Two Screens Russian Courts Apply in Practice

Reading the 2024 to 2026 case law as a body, two recurring screens emerge. Courts do not consistently articulate them as formal gates, but the pattern is identifiable.

The first is the claimant profile. Courts examine whether the entity seeking enforcement, its corporate chain, and its beneficial owner have connections to Ukraine or to “unfriendly” jurisdictions that go beyond mere formality. Two sub-patterns emerge, and they operate differently.

Ukraine connections have been treated by courts as a ground independently sufficient to refuse enforcement. In the case of International Transit S.A.L. (Offshore) v Nevinnomyssk Electrometallurgical Plant (No. А63-2940/2022), the 16^th Appellate Commercial Court produced the most fully reasoned example on June 24, 2025 (this decision was later confirmed by the Commercial Court of the North Caucasus Circuit on September 8, 2025). International Transit is a Lebanese company – Lebanon is not on Russia’s “unfriendly” states list – but the court found that the corporate chain ran through Cypriot and BVI holding companies, and the beneficial owner had conducted business in Ukraine since the 1990s, donated to the building of the Ukrainian embassy in Beirut, and had assets nationalized in Crimea. Lebanon’s non-inclusion in the “unfriendly” list had no legal significance once the corporate chain and the beneficial owner’s history were examined. The cassation court added a further ground, citing the Thywissen Supreme Court’s ruling: the award was rendered in Great Britain. Whether the court meant the LCIA’s location or the arbitral seat in London is unclear from the reasoning, though the practical effect is the same under either reading. Each element was treated as independently sufficient.

Claimant nationality in an “unfriendly” jurisdiction operates differently – as a trigger for heightened scrutiny rather than a categorical bar. The Mazaltov/Slavneft- Yaroslavneftorgsintez litigation (No. А82-19719/2024) shows this clearly: the Yaroslavl court initially refused enforcement against a Bulgarian claimant by invoking the “unfriendly” states list and the presidential counter-sanctions decrees, but the Volga-Vyatka Circuit Court intervened twice – first remanding for reconsideration, then confirming the enforcement grant on a second appeal by the losing party and holding that nationality alone is insufficient without showing that the decrees actually apply to the specific transaction. The claimant’s “unfriendly” nationality is regularly invoked as a ground for refusal at first instance, but it is correctable on appeal when a proper transaction-specific analysis is conducted. How consistently appellate courts outside the Volga-Vyatka Circuit will apply this correction remains to be seen.

The second screen is the institutional and geographic profile of the arbitration itself. The post-2022 pattern shows refusal when the arbitral institution is based in an “unfriendly” state, when the arbitrators hold citizenship of “unfriendly” states, or when the seat is in an “unfriendly” jurisdiction. Courts have treated each ground as independently sufficient in the cases reviewed. Neither post-sanctions agreement to the clause nor participation in the proceedings cures the defect.

Two cases brought by AMSTRADshipping OU, an Estonian shipping company, establish this with clarity. Both arose from charterparties concluded in December 2022, after Singapore’s inclusion on the list of “unfriendly” states, with arbitration administered by the Singapore Chamber of Maritime Arbitration (“SCMA”). In both instances (case No. A45-1031/2025), the claimant argued that Singapore was neutral, that SCMA held permanent arbitral institution status in Russia, and that the respondent had participated in selecting the arbitrator. The circuit court upheld the refusal: Singapore’s inclusion on the “unfriendly” list created a structural presumption of partiality against both the institution and the arbitrators that participation in arbitration could not dispel. The Rostov case (No. A53-32564/2025, dated February 11, 2026) reached the same result on narrower grounds: the refusal rested solely on the fact that the SCMA is based in Singapore, and the defendant’s participation in arbitration by email correspondence was dismissed entirely. The Northwest Circuit Court applied the same arbitrator nationality presumption in November 2025 to block recognition of an ICC award seated in Amsterdam, where the tribunal comprised citizens of the Netherlands and Singapore (No. A42-5661/2025, dated November 21, 2025), confirming that the ground is not circuit-specific.

Where This Architecture Produces Enforcement

Against this backdrop, the cases in which Russian courts have enforced foreign awards define the circumstances in which Russian courts may rule in favor of enforcement.

A notable result emerged from the Moscow Commercial Court in February 2026. In case No. A40-118932/2025, a Russian company, JSC Informtekhnika, sought enforcement of an SCC award rendered in Stockholm against a Kazakh bank that had refused to honour an irrevocable bank guarantee. The court granted enforcement, rejecting public policy objections as attempts to relitigate the merits and refusing a stay pending annulment proceedings at the Svea Court of Appeal. What makes the decision notable is what it does not address: Sweden is on the “unfriendly” list, and under the second screen, that ground alone would ordinarily be sufficient to refuse enforcement. Yet the court said nothing about it. The Moscow Circuit Court upheld the enforcement on May 6, 2026, finding no public policy violation and no grounds for refusal, again without addressing Sweden’s status as an “unfriendly” state or the SCC’s location there.

The Mazaltov/Slavneft-Yaroslavneftorgsintez case (No. A82-19719/2024) resulted in a sustained correction across two rounds of cassation. A Bulgarian company had obtained an ICAC award of 20,000 euros in legal costs against a Russian oil company. The Yaroslavl court refused enforcement, citing the claimant’s Bulgarian nationality and the counter-sanction presidential decrees. The Volga-Vyatka Circuit Court remanded in July 2025, holding that the inclusion of a state in the “unfriendly” list does not, by itself, prohibit enforcement in favor of its residents, and that a court cannot refuse simply by listing normative acts without analyzing whether they apply to the transaction. On remand, the Yaroslavl court granted enforcement in October 2025. Slavneft appealed again. The Volga-Vyatka Circuit Court confirmed in March 2026 that the decrees did not apply to this type of transaction, that the claimant was not on the personal sanctions list, and that the absence of a Russian bank account is a matter for the enforcement stage, not a ground for refusing the order. Two rounds of cassation in the same circuit produced the same answer.

What This Means in Practice

For practitioners advising clients with existing awards, the framework maps to four practical questions: does the beneficial owner have business history in Ukraine; is the arbitral institution based in an “unfriendly” jurisdiction; do the arbitrators hold citizenship of “unfriendly” states; and is the seat in an “unfriendly” jurisdiction? If the answers are yes across the board, enforcement is unlikely to succeed regardless of the award’s merits. If the answers are mostly no, the Mazaltov line of cases suggests enforcement is worth attempting, though how consistently appellate courts outside the Volga-Vyatka Circuit will apply that correction remains to be seen. Claimant nationality in an “unfriendly” state triggers scrutiny but is not categorically fatal if the transaction falls outside the counter-sanction decrees.

The patterns described here reflect decisions available in the public domain as of June 3, 2026. Individual cases may present facts that distinguish them from the decisions surveyed.