History knows a mechanism where an aggressor state compensates the damage it caused — not out of goodwill, but by force. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the UN Compensation Commission was created and paid out more than $52 billion to those who suffered — individuals, companies, governments. The money came from the aggressor’s own export revenues. There was only one key condition: compensation went to those who could document their losses.
Ukraine is building its own version of this mechanism today. The international Register of Damages is up and running, and the first national programs have appeared. These are important steps — but here we should be honest. For now, this is more a recording of the scale of losses than actual payouts: the mechanisms are at their very start, and submitting a claim to the Register does not mean automatic compensation. For a business that lost its production today, the state’s response remains, for now, more theory than money in the account.
But alongside the state programs, international legal instruments already exist, aimed at compensating Ukrainian business at the expense of Russian assets. The logic here is different from a state program. It works on the principle of aggregating a large pool of claims — which delivers an economic efficiency unattainable for a single claimant. And the case is not limited to a single register: claims are registered in all relevant damage registers (including RD4U) and pursued through every available legal avenue across international jurisdictions.
The path itself is clearly structured: client identification and a professional assessment of the loss → a representation agreement → active handling of the case by specialists in international jurisdictions. This is exactly what our work is about. We know how these mechanisms are built, and we know how to guide an enterprise through the entire path: to properly record the loss, assemble the evidence base, and prepare the case so that it is ready when the window for real payouts opens. Because, as all global experience shows, the first to receive compensation are not those who demand it the loudest, but those who were prepared from the very beginning.
