Date of publication: 9 November 2026
Oleksandr Fefelov, Attorney, Partner, Head of Antitrust and Competition Practice
Anastasiia Leontieva, Lawyer
Source: Chambers
The fourth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA4), released jointly in February 2026 by the World Bank, the European Commission, the United Nations and the Government of Ukraine, puts the cost of recovery at USD 588 billion over the coming decade. For an investor, this is more than a statistic: donors and international financial institutions rely on this assessment when allocating funds across sectors and regions, so in practice it is a map of the tenders to come. Energy, transport, housing and municipal infrastructure account for the bulk of that figure, and much of the money will flow through public tenders financed by the state budget, the EU’s Ukraine Facility under Regulation (EU) 2024/792, and the lending programmes of the World Bank, EBRD, EIB and the Council of Europe Development Bank.
For a foreign contractor, the commercial opportunity is obvious. The legal one is less so. Ukraine is rewriting its procurement law amid war, its civil law has just absorbed the contractual rules of the repealed Commercial Code, and martial-law currency controls still shape how and when money leaves the country. Winning work and getting paid for it depend on reading these three layers together, not one at a time.
Two Procurement Laws, One Transition
Contractors bidding today work under a hybrid regime. The Law of Ukraine “On Public Procurement” No. 922-VIII of 25 December 2015 remains the operative statute, applied during martial law through the Particulars approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 1178 of 12 October 2022. Alongside it sits the new Law “On Public Procurement” No. 4888-IX of 27 May 2026, which entered into force on 24 June 2026 but is being phased in. Its updated localization rules took effect on 24 August 2026; the statute as a whole becomes operative on 24 March 2027, and Law No. 922-VIII lapses on the same day. Under Section XIV of Law No. 4888-IX, procedures launched before that date are completed under the old rules, and the Ministry of Economy confirmed in its letter No. 3323-04/76414-06 of 17 August 2026 that Resolution No. 1178 continues to apply during the transition.
The practical consequence is that a bid prepared in January 2027 and a contract amended in mid-2027 may be governed by different statutes. Tender documentation should be read for the date the procedure was announced, not the date the bid is filed.
Access itself is not the obstacle. Non-residents enjoy national treatment in Prozorro, and Ukraine’s accession to the WTO Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) in 2016 means that the localization requirement introduced by Law No. 1977-IX of 16 December 2021 does not reach goods originating in GPA parties, which include the EU member states, the United States, Japan, Korea and Switzerland. Contractors sourcing machinery from non-GPA jurisdictions, notably China and Turkey, should model the localization threshold into their supply chain before bidding. Where a project is financed by an international financial institution, Law No. 922-VIII allows the lender’s own procurement rules to displace the domestic procedure. In practice, this means World Bank or EBRD standard bidding documents and contracts based on the model forms of FIDIC, the International Federation of Consulting Engineers, which Western contractors know well. These forms provide for an independent engineer who certifies the work performed and the amounts payable, and for a Dispute Avoidance/Adjudication Board (DAAB) that hears disagreements before they reach arbitration. Complaints about such tenders go not to the Antimonopoly Committee but through the procedure set by the lender’s own rules and under its oversight. Many of these projects first appear on DREAM (Digital Restoration Ecosystem for Accountable Management), the state digital ecosystem in which every reconstruction project is tracked from a community’s application through financing, tender and acceptance of works. A project is often visible there before any procurement notice is published, which makes monitoring the platform the cheapest way to find work at an early stage.
Supply-chain risk does not end with localization. On 15 October 2024 the Interdepartmental Commission on International Trade, acting on a petition by two Ukrainian manufacturers represented by Ilyashev & Partners, imposed provisional anti-dumping duties of 86% on steel, aluminum and bimetallic heating radiators from Turkey and 42% on those from China (Decision No. AD-568/2024/441-01). For a contractor rebuilding housing or schools with imported equipment priced into its estimate, a measure of this kind can change the economics of a project after the bid has been filed, so trade remedies deserve the same scrutiny as the tender documentation itself.
Where Foreign Bids Are Lost: Managing Formal Rejections
Most foreign bids fail on form rather than price. The exclusion grounds in Article 17 of Law No. 922-VIII, as adapted by paragraph 47 of the Particulars, require evidence that is native to Ukrainian registries, and a foreign bidder has to produce functional equivalents: certified extracts on the absence of convictions and tax arrears, apostilled and translated. Beneficial ownership must be disclosed down to the natural person, and any trace of Russian or Belarusian ownership, or a listing under the Law “On Sanctions” No. 1644-VII, is an automatic ground for rejection. Tender security, which the client may demand under Article 25, is normally a bank guarantee, and its wording is checked line by line. A disputed rejection can be challenged before the Antimonopoly Committee under Article 18 within days, and foreign contractors who use that route early tend to be treated more carefully on the next tender.
Case Insight
How much turns on form is clear from a 2025 case handled by Ilyashev & Partners. The telecommunications company HomeNet offered the lowest price in an open Prozorro tender run by the Main Information and Computing Centre branch of JSC Ukrzaliznytsia, yet the procuring entity rejected its bid for supposedly uncorrected deficiencies. The request for correction listed no specific violations, and the flaws later relied on, such as the format of the price proposal and missing patronymics of employees, were purely technical and did not affect the substance of the bid. The AMCU Commission accepted these arguments and ordered the procuring entity to cancel the rejection. For a foreign bidder, whose documents are more likely to differ in form from Ukrainian templates, the lesson is plain: a technical rejection is not the end of the tender.
The Сontract after the Commercial Code
On 28 August 2025, the Commercial Code of Ukraine ceased to have effect under Law No. 4196-IX of 9 January 2025. Construction contracts are now governed by the Civil Code, namely its provisions on construction works and its general rules on force majeure and material change of circumstances. Contractors who relied on the old Commercial Code penalty regime should check whether their templates still cite provisions that no longer exist.
The tighter constraint is procurement law itself. Essential terms of a public contract may change only on the grounds exhaustively listed in Article 41 of Law No. 922-VIII and paragraph 19 of the Particulars, and the Ministry has confirmed that the market-fluctuation price adjustment of up to 10% introduced by Law No. 4888-IX has applied since 24 June 2026. Force majeure helps only in part. Paragraph 4 of Article 41(5) allows the completion date to be extended for documented objective circumstances, including force majeure, but only if the contract sum does not increase. Martial law does not by itself excuse performance either: the Supreme Court consistently requires proof of a causal link between a specific event and the failure to perform, and a certificate from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry is only one item of evidence. Force majeure may therefore shield a contractor from delay penalties, but it will not compensate for rising material costs or crews standing idle during air-raid alerts. Only a mechanism written into the contract at signature can do that: paragraph 7 of Article 41(5) permits price changes linked to the consumer price index, exchange rates or commodity quotations only where the contract itself sets out how the price is to be adjusted. It cannot be negotiated later.
Securing Payment and Navigating Capital Controls
Payment risk in Ukrainian reconstruction is less about client insolvency than about budget sequencing and currency control. The first line of defense is structural: advance payments secured by the contractor’s own guarantee, milestone payments tied to acceptance certificates with deemed-acceptance clauses, and, on donor-funded projects, direct payment from the lender’s account. Where the client pays late, the Civil Code entitles the creditor to inflation losses and 3% per annum regardless of fault, and the parties may agree to a higher rate.
- Structural Protection & Enforcing FIDIC Standards
The case of the Turkish contractor Onur is instructive. In 2020, it signed a FIDIC-based contract with the state employer for the major repair of three sections of the M-05 Kyiv-Odesa highway, to be funded by the EBRD and EIB. The lenders stopped disbursing in 2020-2021, the project never entered the state budget programme, and after the full-scale invasion, the contractor terminated the contract. The independent engineer confirmed the termination and issued a final payment certificate for EUR 21.2 million plus UAH 172.4 million in VAT, yet the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development refused to pay, pointing to the absence of Ukrainian primary acceptance forms and of budget funds. On 14 October 2026, the Commercial Cassation Court of the Supreme Court rejected those arguments with finality: the engineer’s payment certificate under a FIDIC contract is proper evidence of the volume and value of the works, and a shortfall in the state budget does not release a state body from its contractual obligations. For a foreign contractor, this ruling matters as much as any statutory reform: international contract standards hold up in a Ukrainian court, provided the contractor has followed them consistently at every stage of the project.
- Regulatory Compliance & Capital Repatriation
The second line is regulatory. Settlements and repatriation remain subject to the Law “On Currency and Currency Operations” No. 2473-VIII, including the settlement deadlines in Article 13, and to NBU Resolution No. 18 of 24 February 2022. The NBU has eased that regime in stages; Resolution No. 95 of 5 August 2025 permits the transfer abroad of dividends for periods from 2023, capped at EUR 1 million per month under sub-paragraph 46 of paragraph 14, with a separate investment-limit route under sub-paragraph 57. A contractor operating through a Ukrainian subsidiary should plan its profit extraction around those limits from the outset.
- Risk Mitigation, Forum Selection and Enforcement
The third line concerns insurance and the choice of forum. War risks, including damage to the works and expropriation, can be insured with the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), part of the World Bank Group, or with the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). Equally important is the arbitration clause: disputes go to international commercial arbitration under the Law of Ukraine “On International Commercial Arbitration” No. 4002-XII, and the award can be enforced in Ukraine and in more than 170 other states under the 1958 New York Convention, independently of the workload of the national courts. Where the investment is structured through a country that has a bilateral investment treaty with Ukraine, the contractor also gains access to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) at the World Bank if the state itself causes the loss.
Ukraine has built transparent procurement tools and is aligning its statute with EU directives. What it cannot yet offer is predictability across the transition. The contractors who succeed will be those who price the legal calendar into the bid.
