Ukraine’s Supreme Court refused to lift Zelenskyy’s sanctions on opposition leader

Ukraine's Supreme Court refused to lift the sanctions imposed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the opposition leader who ran against him. The Cassation Administrative Court rejected Petro Poroshenko's lawsuit on 10 July, per Interfax Ukraine. Two of the five judges on the panel filed dissenting opinions.

The decision drew condemnation from the International Democrat Union, the global alliance of center-right parties, which called it a politically motivated attempt to suppress the opposition. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko warned that persecuting opposition leaders could threaten Ukrainian democracy.

Poroshenko has opposed Moscow consistently since 2014, and his foundation has delivered tens of thousands of drones to the army, including 500 FPV drones to an air defense regiment on the day the sanctions were announced.

Poroshenko says judges were blackmailed

The ruling was the result of pressure on the court, Poroshenko said on the day of the decision.

"The judges of this panel of five were blackmailed, including their relatives, with the opening of criminal cases if the wrong decision was taken," he said.

Poroshenko claimed he had plans to file a statement with law enforcement and provide journalists with materials for a journalistic investigation.

"Society has the right to know how Ukraine is being cut off from membership in the European Union," said Poroshenko.

His lawyer, Illia Novikov, said the pressure came from the Security Service on the instructions of Bankova, the seat of the President's Office.

"I will release new information that we have not published before... We had information that pressure was being applied to the court ... Now the time has come to name these people. According to our information, they are SBU officers Eduard Rudiuk and Vitalii Solodzhuk," Novikov said.

Novikov said he would ask their leadership to check whether the two men tried to pressure the court. He said four hearings had been disrupted since 5 January 2026, each of which could have been the last in the case, and argued the disruptions bought time to lean on the panel. The two dissenting opinions, he said, show two judges did not yield.

Poroshenko says the clusters will not open in July

Poroshenko said the ruling is blocking Ukraine's EU accession.

"Those who are trying to build authoritarianism in Ukraine instead of democracy have got what they wanted. Seven clusters will not be opened for us," he stressed.

He added that "the reason is today's decision."

"And apart from the foreign policy cluster, unfortunately, with high probability the clusters will not be opened in July," Poroshenko claimed.

He said four foundational documents had been adopted in the past week, including a European Parliament resolution stating that applying sanctions to the opposition leader is illegal, extrajudicial, and unconstitutional, and an OSCE Parliamentary Assembly decision recognizing extrajudicial sanctions against Ukrainian citizens as unlawful.

Poroshenko will appeal to the Supreme Court's Grand Chamber and then to the European Court of Human Rights, which accepted his case in May 2026. His lawyers have filed a second complaint in Strasbourg over the length of the proceedings, as Ukraine's administrative code allows two months for such a case. This one took eighteen.