Lawfare Archive: Reparations for Russia's Aggression Against Ukraine with Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi and Patrick Pearsall

The Lawfare Podcast

This Lawfare Podcast archive episode features Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi and Patrick Pearsall detailing the creation and implementation of Ukraine's reparations strategy following Russia's

Key takeaways

• Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi conceived the reparations mechanism while sheltering in a car park during early war strikes, later pitching it to President Zelenskyy who approved its immediate development.
• The strategy employs a three-pillar approach: a digital damage registry for evidence collection, an administrative claims commission for adjudication, and a compensation fund for payouts.

Main topics

• Genesis and design of Ukraine's reparations strategy
• Structure and function of the Register of Damage for Ukraine

Notable quotes

"Justice is non-negotiable. And reparations are part of justice. This is what we are all pursuing."

Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive roadmap for how international legal frameworks can be rapidly

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Hi, friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at VoteFromAbroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to VoteFromAbroad.org now and click Request My Ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. VoteFromAbroad.org. Speaker 1 (0:37) I'm Athena Smith, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for October 3rd, 2026. On the night of September 29th to 30th, Russia unleashed a barrage of attacks on Ukraine's power grid, killing at least seven and leaving millions without reliable electricity as winter looms. For today's archive, I chose an episode from July 16th, 2025, in which former Lawfare legal fellow Mikhailo Soldatenko and Lawfare Senior Editor Scott Anderson sat down with Markiyan Kuzhkovsky, Executive Director of the Register of Damage for Ukraine at the Council of Europe, and Patrick Pierschel, Director of the International Claims and Reparations Project at Columbia Law School. The two guests described their roles in proposing and designing Ukraine's reparation strategy following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and discussed the relevance of reparations in the Russian-Ukraine conflict. Speaker 5 (1:39) It's Lawfare podcast. My name is Mikhailo Soltatenko, Lawfare legal fellow. And together with Scott Anderson, Lawfare senior editor, we are joined by Markyank Luchkovsky, executive director of the Register of Damage for Ukraine at the Council of Europe, and a former legal advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine on the issue of reparations. And Patrick Pearsall. partner at the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson Dunn, and former chief of investment arbitration at the U.S. Department of State. Patrick also advised Ukraine on reparations as a director of the Columbia Law School Claims and Reparations Project. Speaker 6 (2:20) I think there is an interest in Russia to ensure a process, just like Iraq did in the UNCC context, to find a way forward that gives a structure and a pathway for settling these issues in a way that won't expose them to jurisdictions throughout the world. Today Speaker 5 (2:42) we discuss the steps Ukraine has made so far on the path of getting reparations from Russia, Ukraine's reparation mechanism, the fate of frozen Russian assets, and the relevance of the reparations to the Ukraine-Russia talks that took place recently. As of December 2024, the estimate costs for Ukraine recovery and reconstruction after the war is... 500 billion dollars. And two of our guests from the early months of the full-scale invasion of Russia against Ukraine advised Ukraine on ways how to effectively get compensation for the damage. And it would be fair to say that they are founding fathers of the reparation initiative. So let's start with Markian. So Markian, how this idea... to design a mechanism in order to have an effective way to get compensation from Russia. How did it emerge? How did you pitch it to the Ukrainian government? and just give us the gist of the idea. Speaker 3 (4:03) Well, thanks, first of all, for having me on the podcast. Really a pleasure to be here and to talk about these things. The idea for the reparations mechanism came in a somewhat dramatic fashion. Like many Ukrainians in the early days of the war, I was spending a night in a bomb shelter. which doubled as my car park under my building. I was in the car. I was cold and miserable, quite upset, naturally. And I was trying to dig deep into 20 years of experience in international dispute resolution and private practice to figure out a way to sue Russia for damage, because that is in my professional DNA to find a way to sue those who have wronged all my clients and general public and so on and so forth. And frankly, quickly came to the realization that there is no forum where that suit could be brought, that there were damage could be claimed. Then I started looking at how these things were handled in the past and other conflicts, other wars, realized that there's this thing of a claims commission that usually tackles things like that. One thing led to another. I realized I need some support for that, so I called out Patrick, quite literally gave him a call and asked if Patrick knew anything about claims commission and maybe we could put our heads together. Patrick brought in a couple of more people into that discussion with experience on conflict, post-conflict reparation mechanisms. And we put together, I wouldn't even call it a non-paper, a three-page note or two and a half page note outlining basic ideas of how that could be pulled together considering the natural limitations, political and legal, most notably Russia's obvious unwillingness and inability to cooperate and Russia's role as a permanent member of the Security Council and the inability of that body to intervene. So we proposed the mechanism that would be built through the joint effort of the able and willing states, able and willing to uphold the values of international law, the principles of international law, the UN Charter, the basic fundamental rules that those who are states that are responsible for violations of international law are under the duty to make reparation. And we pitched that to the Ukrainian government. through the people that we knew through our previous work and that idea gained traction. We had a chance to present it to President Zelenskyy and then we were quite frankly told to go and do it. So there I am. Speaker 5 (6:51) Patrick, do you want to add anything to this first Speaker 6 (6:54) moment? Well... Two things, I guess. Go and do it. I mean, part of the next 30 minutes or 40 minutes of the podcast will be talking about challenges and how we are seeking to overcome them or did overcome them. But lost in that conversation is, I think, the real genesis of this, which is a belief that international law has a remedy in an instance like this, right? This is a completely... Speaker 6 (7:26) unique situation when it comes to the establishment of a claims commission. Previous claims commissions have only been established after a dispute, after a conflict is completed as part of the reparations process, which must follow. We started literally a week to two weeks after the full-scale invasion began. which is unique and has raised all sorts of interesting challenges that Mark Yan and I and some others have sought to overcome. But I want to underline what I think is a real beautiful part of this narrative, which is a deep belief in the infancy of this horrific... illegal invasion, this horrific aggression, this violation of the UN Charter, a deep belief that international law has an answer to that. And I think that that belief wasn't just shared among international lawyers like us on the podcast, but really... at its core in Ukrainian government, right? At the highest levels. It is incredibly courageous and powerful, in my view, that President Zelensky and his advisors decided within weeks of the invasion, when they were being told that this invasion would result in the end of their government and their exile or potentially worse, that... They wanted to know what can the law do to ensure that victims in Mariupol, elsewhere, are compensated for the illegality. And I think that that's a really powerful belief and a powerful motivator. And for me, that has been really the fuel that has sustained me in this three-year journey. And certainly... the courage of that kind of belief and kind of seeing what Markian has done now is just amazing. So I just didn't want that to be lost in the origin story. And now we can talk about all the challenges and the things we did and basically how Markian and I and some others were told no constantly, and we just kind of did it. And now the same people... And I'm thinking here of the G7 and others who have told us no or told us no in 2022, time and time again, are now kind of all yeses, which is a really remarkable turn of events. But we can talk about that. Speaker 2 (10:10) So the institution that we're primarily talking about here, the novel aspect of the registry, isn't something that exists in a lot of claims context. It's a very novel instrument, not entirely unprecedented by any means, but... exceptional compared to a lot of other claims arrangements, including coming out of armed conflicts. And it's not the only strategy Ukraine has considered, was considered when you came up with this proposal, is still pursuing. Talk to us about how the registry idea came about and fits within the broader ecosystem of mechanisms of accountability and specifically looking at reparations and compensation for Ukraine and for Ukrainians arising out of this conflict. I'm curious, particularly about reactions initially. Why was there that skepticism from the G7? Was there similar skepticism on the parts of the Ukrainian side? And where is that founded? What were the alternatives that people were seeing as opposed to a step like this? Patrick, I'll start with you, and then Mark, and I'll come to you next. Speaker 6 (11:04) Yeah, sure. Part of this, I mean, was both a structural choice, but also a lot of it was driven by political exigency. So let me start with the structural choice. the the structural elegance of a damages registry and there there is precedent for for registries of damage while a conflict is ongoing right i'm thinking of unrod and some others but but but we thought structurally that's something that folks in the united nations in the council of europe in the g7 could understand right let's at least account for the damage that is being done, gather evidence while it's still fresh. And that, I think, was understood both as an international law reaction, but also in part as a defensive, almost military structure. And that, you know, we anticipated and still anticipate that in discussions... to cease the conflict, for the conflict to end, there will need to be a discussion on the amount of damage that has been visited upon Ukraine. So we wanted to make sure that those chips, that conversation was in the hands of those people who had been damaged so that they could put that case to the aggressor as part of the ceasefire and things like that. So it had an elegance on all sides of the house structurally. But from a political standpoint, the damages registry was where the G7 thought they were, I think, safest with regard to general principles of public international law in that there was no adjudicatory process whereby claims could be put to Russia or the aggressors. and result in an award, right? So that was a bridge too far, but there was a political need to make sure that the damage that was occurring, which at the time in 2022, most thought would be ending much sooner than it did. There was that kind of move where let's account for it, but there was a firm skepticism. on anything more, right? Jurisdiction, some process whereby claims could be put, how to use the funds, which I know we're going to get to, how would this be funded? All of that, we studiously... tried to not talk about in the early days of creating this thing, but we knew we needed something to get the train moving, right? And this metaphor of kind of trying to build the plane while flying it, I think is Markian's metaphor, or getting the train moving. We understood that once we had a certain amount of momentum, right, as long as we were keeping it in the kind of international law. structures, things that people understood. But as long as we had a momentum, we could start to make new law, which is what we did. But we needed to start with something that was very recognizable and modest, which is why a registry of damage was our first choice. But the other thing that was really important here was at least Markan and I understood that the damages registry alone. without an adjudicatory process or without a claims commission, which is what Markian's working on now, that alone would almost be, frankly, in my personal opinion, worse than nothing. Because giving people a right without a remedy or having them make claims where there's no result in compensation, that would harm international law norms, right? That's ultimately... worse politically and worse for an international law result. So we always had it in our mind to have the second part, and we can tell you a little bit how we decided to do that. But let me pause there for Markian's response. Speaker 3 (15:24) I think I can mostly just add a few things to that. One is that we... tried to approach this process holistically, a fashionable word to use in this context. We understood that what we are proposing is very new. It has some precedent, but not in the way we were proposing to get there, and certainly not in the context of an ongoing active hot war of that scale. So the holistic approach that I mentioned was not only to talk to, you know, within our small groups not only to talk to the ukrainian government to see what they feel like about the issue it was also engaging broader community those who have spent years and decades working on these programs those who have written about that academically so we've engaged them in in that discussion to stress test a little bit our idea um and through that stress testing it it one of the suggestions that rose after that after the discussion would be to use another metaphor that I like, to not eat an elephant in one go, but actually approach it one piece at a time, because that would make it a little bit easier to digest, easier to even understand what we are trying to build. And as Patrick has said, it would make it easier for states, G7 and many others, to commit to something that is not. massive, that is not huge, that can actually be manageable. So we looked at that from a point of view of a roadmap that we need to go through to achieve that result. We understood that we needed to get some political and legal mandate from the broader community. So the first point of order was to see if we can get that mandate from the General Assembly. of the United Nations that was sitting in emergency special session, United for Peace context, in the context of locked Security Council. We had the example of the damage register for UNRWA established by the General Assembly. So that became the basic premise that we started to work with. One particular challenge that we had was to go step by step, but also never lose sight of where we wanted to end up. So that sense of perspective of the completeness of the claims mechanism, completeness of the reparations program that we're trying to build was paramount because as Patrick has said, and I can only subscribe to that wholeheartedly, the register in itself makes no sense as an independent and a standalone entity. It only makes sense as a component of of something bigger. So we went through that. There was, of course, a huge amount of skepticism, disbelief. Essentially, every initial conversation that we had with the government or an institution, the first response we ever got was, that's impossible. That's too much. That's too hard. That's unprecedented. Lawyers and politicians like precedents to rely on. We did not have a luxury of that necessarily. But also, not to say that this was something that was dictated externally. This is, and I'm living through that reality right now, having a register of damage as this first component to work out the way for claimants to submit claims, to collect evidence in a coherent way across different categories, different types of claims, different types of claimants. To have that process worked out on a scale like the war in Ukraine requires, in many ways, the register is also a proof of concept that that is possible to do with limited resources and with a lean budget, not becoming a bureaucracy, becoming a lean, agile organization. And I think and I hope that we're executing on that quite well. Speaker 5 (19:32) Markian, if I may, a short follow up on that. So when you... put forward this idea. Ukraine had a number of legal advisors, and they were also probably proposing and had some thoughts. So what were the alternative pathways to getting there, and how they differed from your and Patrick's idea? Speaker 3 (19:54) First of all, we never insisted