We recently held our internal case law review — a session where the Resolut team goes through fresh court decisions before they land on our desks as actual disputes.
This time, six cases. One clear theme running through all of them: what courts actually do with evidence, burden of proof, and the limits of judicial intervention.
A few takeaways worth sharing.
Russian courts — and not only Russian ones — instinctively distrust expert opinions prepared at a party’s request. The Supreme Court had to remind lower courts once again: a privately commissioned expert opinion does not lose its evidentiary value. Credibility must be challenged on substance, not dismissed on procedural grounds. If you are building a case, notarising the expert’s statement and reserving the argument for the appellate stage tends to work significantly better than leading with it at first instance.
A Russian freight forwarder entered into a settlement agreement with its Hong Kong principal, accepted liability for cargo worth ~$1.5M, and then claimed that sum from its Russian sub-forwarder. The Supreme Court refused the claim entirely. The settlement agreement alone does not establish loss. Damages must be supported by shipping documents — not by what you agreed to pay upstream. Any excess over the documented cargo value is at risk of being treated as an unjustified transfer of funds to a counterparty in an “unfriendly” jurisdiction. We see this logic applied broadly in cross-border disputes involving CIS-routed trade right now.
The Cyprus Court of Appeal confirmed what practitioners have known since Achmea (2018) but investors keep testing: a BIT between two EU Member States offers no protection once both states are inside the EU. A Polish investor who lost €430K in the Laiki Bank haircut had no claim against Cyprus under the Cyprus–Poland BIT. EU law simply displaces it. If you are advising investors with European assets, the protection framework needs to be built differently — through TFEU mechanisms or, where still viable, through the Energy Charter Treaty.
Courts are drawing clearer lines between what they will do for parties and what parties must do for themselves. Passive litigation strategy — waiting for the court to request documents, fill evidentiary gaps, or apply the most favourable legal framework — is becoming riskier. The cases we reviewed this month all involved courts declining to compensate for a party’s procedural inactivity.
At Resolut, we track Russian case law alongside developments in foreign jurisdictions — because our clients’ disputes rarely stay within just one of them.
If you’d like to receive our full case digest, feel free to reach out: info@resolut.legal
