Purpose This paper aims to analyse how, in 2018–2025, Ukrainian civil and commercial courts have been used to detect and neutralise sanctions circumvention schemes that are disguised as ordinary private-law transactions in the wartime context. Design/methodology/approach This study used doctrinal analysis of Ukrainian legislation and sanction-related court decisions (2018–2025), purposive sampling and coding by evasion/circumvention pathway, followed by triangulation against official anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) and export-control guidance and relevant EU/US policy documents. Findings Based on seven court disputes (2018–2025), this paper identifies recurring sanctions-circumvention typologies implemented through private-law instruments (registry manipulation/beneficial-ownership concealment, asset transfers, procedural substitution, claim assignment and award-based debt collection). The courts’ reasoning consistently turns on continuity of control, temporal proximity between designation and the transaction and opacity/artificiality of the restructuring. Supreme Court practice on recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards shows heightened scrutiny where the economic beneficiary may be a sanctioned entity. Research limitations/implications Research limitations include jurisdiction-specific evidence; replication in EU implementing jurisdictions is recommended. Practical implications Practical implications include transaction-level risk indicators for banks, corporates and investigators; policy options to align civil-law remedies with AML/CFT and export-control objectives. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is among the first studies to derive a sanctions-circumvention taxonomy for Ukraine directly from court practice and to translate that case law into a structured set of transaction-level risk indicators and policy options for aligning civil-law remedies with sanctions, AML/CFT and export-control objectives.
Naidon et al. (Fri,) studied this question.