The panel of judges of the Cassation Chamber of the Supreme Court, which is hearing Petro Poroshenko’s lawsuit against President Zelenskyy regarding the repeal of the decree on sanctions, has ordered the National Security and Defense Council, the Cabinet of Ministers, and the Ministry of Economy to provide all documents related to the decision-making process regarding the sanctions. The deadline for submitting the documents is August 11. The next hearing is scheduled for August 19, 2025.

This was reported by “Eurosolidarity.”

During today’s meeting, it became clear that President Zelenskyy’s representative in court could not answer questions about how the decision-making process took place, as she had not participated in the NSDC meeting. She also stated that the sanctions were allegedly imposed for disciplinary purposes to prevent potential threats to national interests posed by the fifth president.

“The first meeting was on April 17, and only one meeting was held each month. All that time, it was a preparatory stage; we were figuring out which documents the government had not yet provided, why it had not provided them, and whether it could provide them. Eventually, we did begin to discuss the merits of the case. We presented our arguments to the court, and we heard the position of the president’s representative, which boils down to the idea that the president can do whatever he wants,” lawyer Ilya Novikov said in comments to journalists.

“The version presented in their documents is that the sanctions are preventive. And today we finally heard what that means in plain language, because ‘preventive’ is a complicated term. The sanctions are intended to discipline Poroshenko. Do you understand what that means? And this is the opinion of a person who is not just a representative of the president with a power of attorney—he is the representative himself; in other words, this is just as much the official position of the President of Ukraine as if Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself were in this room, answering these questions,” the lawyer explains.

“Our assumption that Andriy Portnov was behind this bill has finally been confirmed, because the letter that Mr. Pronin, the Head of the Financial Monitoring Service, sent on February 12—the one that set off this whole charade—contained verbatim quotes from what Portnov wrote in 2019 on his Telegram channel. And a publication linked to Portnov wrote about this in January—five weeks before Pronin wrote his letter. In other words, Pronin wrote his letter on February 12, but as early as January 4, the newspaper “Law and Business” had reported that, according to experts, the National Security and Defense Council would impose sanctions on Poroshenko precisely for this and that. “That’s exactly what happened,” states Ilya Novikov.

He also noted that the grounds for the sanctions were not the alleged multibillion-dollar financial violations cited by Zelenskyy, but rather the so-called “coal case” and the Kharkiv agreements.

“This is a story about the Kharkiv agreements. It explicitly states there that Poroshenko apparently took an active part in what they described as the informational and legal legitimization of the Kharkiv agreements,” Novikov notes.

He pointed out that Finmonitoring has absolutely no connection to these issues, but its head was used as a tool to at least somewhat legitimize the illegal sanctions.

“What does Finmonitoring have to do with criminal justice at all? Because Pronin agreed to get involved in this situation. Most of the sanctions against individuals were imposed at the suggestion of the SBU based on case files held by the SBU. Why? Because it is the SBU that investigates all terrorism-related cases. And since, in this case, the SBU reported to Zelenskyy that no such information existed, they then found Pronin, who said, ‘I’ll sign this.’ And now everyone is hiding behind Pronin,” Novikov explained.