Sanctions, Arbitration, and Belarus: How to Move a Dispute Forward in 2026

For years, the dispute clause in a contract with a Belarusian company wrote itself. Arbitrate in London or Stockholm, under the rules of a familiar institution, and — thanks to the New York Convention — enforce the eventual award more or less anywhere the losing party kept money. It was close to a reflex, and for a long time it worked. In 2026, that reflex is broken, and it is broken from both ends at once.

From the Western side, sanctions have made the traditional forums hard or impossible for a Belarusian party to use. Arbitrators and counsel decline appointments touching sanctioned entities, institutions have scaled back or suspended services, fees cannot be paid through blocked banks, and an award against a sanctioned party can stall the moment you try to enforce it. From the Belarusian side, the state has pushed back with a legal regime of its own: a sanctioned Belarusian party can now pull a dispute out of a foreign arbitration and into Belarusian courts, and can ask those courts to order the foreign proceedings stopped altogether. The familiar machinery has not just slowed down — in many cases it has seized.

We have a genuinely new landscape and the old instincts are now actively dangerous. A clause which references a London seat could be worth less than the paper it’s on if the counterparty is sanctioned and the assets are in Minsk. An award obtained in Stockholm may be completely unenforceable precisely where it’s needed. This piece is about how disputes actually proceed in this environment: what sanctions have broken, what Belarus has done in response, what the new 2026 rules of procedure mean and, most importantly of all, how to pick a forum which both parties will be able to use and which will produce an award that you can actually enforce. The underlying theme is this: in 2026 the question is no longer ‘where would we like to fight?’ but ‘where can we win something collectable?’

What sanctions actually broke in arbitration

It helps to be precise about the problem, because “sanctions make arbitration difficult” is too vague to act on. In practice, sanctions attack an arbitration at three distinct points, and a case can be perfectly strong on the merits and still fail at any one of them. Understanding the three is the start of working around them.

The first is constituting and running the tribunal. Major institutions have restricted or withdrawn services where a party is sanctioned; arbitrators, counsel and experts increasingly decline appointments that touch a sanctioned entity, for fear of breaching sanctions themselves; and even administrative steps — correspondence, hearings, visas for participants — become fraught. The second is money. Arbitration runs on payments: filing fees, deposits for the tribunal’s costs, counsel’s fees, and ultimately the award sum, and every one of those has to pass through a bank. Where the party or its bank is sanctioned, those transfers can be blocked or frozen, and an arbitration that cannot be paid for cannot proceed.

The third, and the one that catches people latest, is enforcement. Winning an award is not the same as collecting on it. A foreign arbitral award has to be recognised and enforced by a court where the debtor has assets, and sanctions can obstruct that final step — a court in one jurisdiction may refuse to enforce against a sanctioned party, a payout may itself require a licence, or the assets may sit somewhere the award simply does not reach. A dispute strategy that solves the first two problems and ignores the third produces a trophy, not a recovery. All three have to be planned for together, from the outset.

Seen together, the three pressure points — and the move that answers each — look like this.

A case can be strong on the merits and still fail at any one of the three — which is why all three are planned together, not in sequence.

Belarus’s answer: Law 280-Z and “exclusive competence”

Belarus did not sit still while its companies were shut out of Western forums. Through Law No. 280-Z of 12 July 2023 on the application of special restrictive measures, it built a legal counter-response that any party contracting with a Belarusian counterparty now has to reckon with. Its two key provisions — Articles 10 and 11 — change the calculus of where a dispute can be fought.

Article 10 gives Belarusian courts exclusive competence over commercial disputes involving sanctioned Belarusian persons, or disputes that arise from sanctions imposed on them. Crucially, this can override a foreign arbitration or foreign-court clause: where a Belarusian court finds that sanctions make that clause unenforceable — that they have, in effect, denied the Belarusian party access to justice in the agreed forum — it can take the dispute for itself. The logic is that a party cannot be held to a London or Stockholm arbitration it is physically and financially prevented from using. Whatever one thinks of it, it means a carefully drafted foreign clause is no longer a guarantee of where the fight will happen.

Article 11 goes further, and this is the provision that most unsettles foreign parties: it allows a Belarusian party sued abroad to ask a Belarusian court for an anti-suit injunction — an order restraining the foreign arbitration or litigation from continuing. These are not theoretical. Belarusian courts have already used this power, barring foreign counterparties from continuing arbitrations where visa restrictions and payment barriers left the Belarusian party with no real opportunity to defend itself. For a foreign claimant, the practical danger is stark: you can be mid-arbitration, confident in your clause, and find your counterparty armed with a Belarusian order telling you to stop — and a parallel case running against you at home in Minsk.

The result is the modern day cross border nightmare in that you have two fora each claiming to be the one with jurisdiction and each one going down a very different and ultimately irreconcilable path. It’s a mistake to ignore the Belarusian track simply because it seems illegitimate as the Belarusian court is the one that is sitting where the assets are. The regime has to be part of the equation in any dispute which has any relevance to Belarus, it can’t just be ignored.

The anti-suit injunction up close

Because the anti-suit injunction is the part of the Belarusian regime that most alarms foreign parties, it is worth being precise about what it can and cannot do, so that it is neither underestimated nor overrated. An anti-suit injunction is an order directed at a party — not at the foreign tribunal — forbidding it from commencing or continuing the foreign proceedings. It operates on the person it is addressed to and on anything within the Belarusian court’s reach, and it is typically backed by the threat of liability or penalties for disobedience. That is its mechanism: it leans on the party, and on the party’s exposure in Belarus, rather than on the foreign arbitration directly.

What it does not do is bind the foreign tribunal, which is seated in another country and answers to another legal order. A London or Stockholm tribunal can, and often will, carry on regardless, and a Belarusian anti-suit order is not automatically recognised abroad. So the realistic effect is rarely that your arbitration simply stops; it is that you end up running two proceedings at once — the foreign arbitration and a parallel Belarusian case — with an injunction hanging over the former. The order’s true weight is practical, not formal: it comes from the fact that the Belarusian court usually sits exactly where the counterparty’s assets are, so defying it can carry real consequences for any recovery that has to land in Belarus.

The correct response is neither panic nor dismissal. If the other side is sanctioned then an anti-suit injunction is very much a real possibility and you have to plan for it. You need to assess early on whether it’s in your interest to race to the forum which actually controls the assets, you need to assess whether your foreign award will ever be enforceable where it needs to be and you need to take specific Belarusian advice on how exposed your case is. To treat the injunction as just empty theatre is a mistake. To treat it as the end of the road is a mistake. It’s a strategic consideration which you have to price in just like any other.

The 2026 reset: a single new procedural code

On top of the sanctions regime sits a structural change that makes 2026 a genuine turning point. On 1 January 2026, Belarus brought into force a new, unified Code of Civil Procedure that merged the former separate codes of civil and commercial procedure into one. For anyone litigating or enforcing in Belarus, this is not a cosmetic renumbering: it is the new operating manual for how cases — including the recognition and enforcement of foreign awards and judgments — actually run, and guidance written against the old two-code system is now out of date.

For arbitration the reassuring degree of continuity is that Belarus is still a party to the 1958 New York Convention on the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards and the grounds under the new Code for refusing enforcement are precisely those set out in Convention Article V. In other words the fundamental basis for getting a foreign award recognised in Belarus is still the well established international standard and a clean award from a proper arbitration is in principle enforceable here. That is of course very significant in that it means the Belarusian door is not shut to foreign awards on the basis of law.

The caution is that two of the Convention’s escape hatches remain fully live, and a Belarusian court can reach for them on its own initiative. An award can be refused recognition if the subject matter is not arbitrable under Belarusian law, or if enforcement would be contrary to Belarusian public policy — and in the sanctions context, those categories are exactly where the pressure falls. So the 2026 picture is a balanced one: the formal framework for enforcing foreign awards is intact and international in character, but it sits alongside a sanctions regime and public-policy and arbitrability carve-outs that can be decisive in precisely the disputes this article is about.

The forum options now — and what each is good for

Put the pieces together and the practical question becomes: given all of this, where should a Belarus-linked dispute actually go? There is no single right answer, because the right forum depends on who the parties are and where the assets sit. But the realistic menu in 2026 has four main options, and it is worth seeing them side by side before weighing them.

There is no universally “best” forum — the right one is dictated by where the counterparty’s assets are and whether both sides can actually use it.

The forum that has quietly risen in importance is the International Arbitration Court at the BelCCI — the arbitral institution at the Belarusian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. For a dispute where the Belarusian party is sanctioned and the assets are in Belarus, it offers something the Western institutions no longer can: a forum the Belarusian side can actually use, administering a genuine arbitration, producing an award that is straightforwardly enforceable in Belarus. It is not the automatic answer for every case, but for a large share of Belarus-facing disputes it is now a serious and often superior option to a Western seat that may never deliver a collectable result.

The other realistic routes each have their place. A genuinely neutral, non-sanctioning seat — Hong Kong or mainland China, for instance — can work where the assets are in a third country whose courts will enforce the award and where neither side is shut out of the forum. And the Belarusian state courts, reached through the Law 280-Z route or simply because that is where the defendant and its assets are, are a direct path to a domestic, enforceable judgment. The traditional Western forums are not banned — but for a Belarus-linked dispute in 2026 they are increasingly the option that produces a paper victory and nothing more.

Enforcement decides the forum, not the other way round

If there is one discipline that separates a sound dispute strategy from a wishful one in 2026, it is this: start from where the assets are, and work backwards. The seductive mistake is to choose the forum you trust most — often a Western institution with a reputation for fairness — and assume enforcement will follow. In the sanctions era, that gets the sequence exactly wrong, because the most pristine award in the world is worthless if you cannot land it on the counterparty’s money.

The first question in any Belarus scenario is not a jurisdictional one at all. It’s a factual one. Where are the assets of this counterparty actually located? In Belarus? In Russia? In some jurisdiction in the Gulf or Asia? In some other jurisdiction still which is within the reach of the Western courts? The answer to that question completely changes the picture. If the assets are in Belarus then an award that is enforceable in Belarus (an IAC award at the BelCCI or a Belarusian court judgment) will be far more valuable than a London award which you simply cannot enforce in Belarus. If the assets are in a third country which is not subject to sanctions then you want an award which will be recognised in that country’s courts and that points you towards a neutral seat rather than Minsk. The forum is downstream of the assets, not upstream.

This is also why asset-tracing and preservation belong at the very front of a case rather than the end. Knowing where the money is shapes the choice of forum; keeping it from moving while the dispute runs is what ensures there is something to enforce against when you win. Decision-makers who internalise this one reordering — assets first, forum second, merits third — tend to make far better calls in these disputes than those who argue about the merits and discover the enforcement problem only at the finish line.

One dispute, three outcomes: a worked example

To see just how important the asset map is, take a very straightforward dispute and run it three ways. A foreign supplier has a claim of two million euros against a Belarusian buyer who has since been sanctioned, under a contract which contains a reflexive Stockholm (SCC) arbitration clause. The merits are exactly the same in each version. The only thing that changes the outcome is where the buyer has the recoverable assets.

In the first version, the buyer’s assets are all in Belarus. Here the Stockholm route is close to a dead end: the buyer can invoke Law 280-Z to challenge the clause and seek an anti-suit injunction, and even a clean SCC award would then have to be enforced in Belarus, straight into the sanctions and public-policy friction. The supplier recovers far more reliably by abandoning the reflex and pursuing the dispute where the money is — through the IAC at the BelCCI or the Belarusian courts — producing a result that is directly enforceable against the Belarusian assets.

In the second version, the buyer’s recoverable assets sit in a non-sanctioning third country — a Gulf or Asian jurisdiction that enforces New York Convention awards and does not apply the relevant sanctions. Now a genuinely neutral seat, such as Hong Kong, comes into its own: an award there can be enforced against the assets where they actually are, and the Belarusian 280-Z machinery is largely beside the point because recovery never needs to touch Belarus. In a third version, where the assets are scattered and some remain within reach of Western courts, a more conventional route may still work for that slice — but only for that slice. The lesson sits in the contrast: same contract, same breach, same two million euros, and three different right answers, each dictated not by the merits but by the map of the assets.

If you are already in a dispute: triage

For a dispute that’s already live the priority is a sensible assessment at the outset as the first move can be very expensive to undo. You start with the clause you actually have and you read it against the new reality rather than the one it was drafted in. Then you ask the key questions: is the other side sanctioned and can it plausibly invoke the Law 280-Z route to move the dispute to Belarus or to get an anti-suit injunction against your arbitration? If the answer is yes then a foreign seat approach may well be walking into a wall.

Where that risk is real then two things are worth thinking about at an early stage. The first is speed and sequencing. In a world of competing forums it’s quite possible that who starts where and when will be the decisive factor in the whole dispute. It may well be that the first move in the forum which actually controls the assets is the decisive one. The second is protecting your position as the jurisdictional battle is being fought out. That’s where interim measures and asset freezing come in. An order freezing the counterparty’s assets in Belarus may be more important to the ultimate recovery than any judgment on the merits. A dispute isn’t won simply by being right. It’s won by being right in some forum where the judgment can be enforced.

It’s also worth keeping the exit in mind. If you’ve got two forums each claiming the dispute and both paths are slow and difficult, a negotiated settlement or a mediation is not an admission of weakness at all. It’s frequently the quickest way to get to the point of actual payment and completely avoids the enforcement trap. The ones who do best in that situation are the ones who go hard on the credible forum but who are also prepared to consider a settlement. They don’t treat it as a fight to be won on principle at any price.

If you are still drafting: the clause that survives 2026

For any contracts that haven’t yet been signed, the single piece of advice is to stop writing the reflexive London or Stockholm clause for a Belarus facing deal and to draft the dispute mechanism as carefully as you do the commercial terms. The dispute resolution clause is the place where a future recovery is quietly won or lost and a naive clause in 2026 is a liability. The choice of seat and institution should be made against a very simple test: can both parties actually use that forum and will the outcome of the proceedings be enforceable where that counterparty keeps its assets?

In practice that’s generally about taking the IAC at the BelCCI or at some genuinely neutral, non-sanctioning seat seriously rather than just going back to a Western seat out of habit. It’s about specifying the governing law, building in payment mechanisms that will work even under banking restrictions and thinking right at the drafting stage about where enforcement will actually occur. It’s not in any way exotic, it’s just dispute clause drafting on the current map rather than the old map. A brief chat with arbitration counsel prior to signing is a lot cheaper than finding out two years and one award down the track that the seat you’ve chosen simply won’t deliver.

The wider picture: Russia, the EAEU and mutual enforcement

Belarus did not invent its exclusive-competence regime in isolation, and understanding the wider pattern helps a foreign party read the terrain. Law 280-Z closely mirrors Russia’s own provision — the well-known Article 248.1 of its commercial procedure code — which gives Russian courts exclusive jurisdiction over disputes involving sanctioned Russian persons, while Article 248.2 provides the same anti-suit power. For a dispute that touches both countries, the sanctions-and-jurisdiction logic therefore meets you from both sides of the union at once, and the instinct to treat Belarus as a one-off is wrong: it is one node in a coordinated regional response to Western sanctions.

The flip side of that coordination is genuinely useful, and it is often overlooked by parties fixated on the Western forums they have lost. Within the CIS and the Eurasian Economic Union there is a functioning framework for mutual recognition of judgments — the Minsk Convention of 1993 and, for commercial disputes between businesses, the Kyiv Agreement of 1992 — under which a judgment or award obtained in Belarus or Russia travels within that bloc far more smoothly than a Western one ever could. For a dispute whose assets sit inside the EAEU, that is an advantage rather than a handicap: a Belarusian result can be recognised and enforced across the neighbouring markets through an established treaty regime.

The practical implication is back in the assets first camp. If the counterparty and its recoverable assets are within the EAEU then the sensible thing to do is to go through the Belarusian or EAEU channels and make use of the mutual enforcement regime that exists there rather than try to hang on to a Western seat which you can’t use and can’t enforce in the first place. If the assets are outside the EAEU you’re back to the neutral seat calculation. Either way the regional picture isn’t just something you have to work around; it’s a set of tools you can use in the right dispute.

A caution for the foreign party: your own sanctions compliance

Everything so far has been about where to fight and how to enforce. There is a second front a foreign claimant must never lose sight of, and it runs in the opposite direction: your own compliance with the sanctions regimes that bind you. The same EU, US or UK measures that make the Western forums unusable for the Belarusian side also regulate what you, the foreign party, may lawfully do — and pursuing, settling with, or enforcing against a sanctioned counterparty is not outside their scope. A settlement is a transaction; an enforced award is a transfer of value; and both can fall within rules you are obliged to follow.

In practice this means the legal question “where can we win something collectable?” has to run alongside a second one: “are we permitted to collect it, and how?” Receiving funds from a sanctioned entity, routing money through particular banks, or even taking certain procedural steps may require a licence or authorisation from the relevant authority in your home jurisdiction, and getting the dispute strategy flawlessly right while getting the compliance wrong is a real way to convert a recovery into a fresh and more serious problem. The two analyses are not sequential — win first, worry about compliance later — they are simultaneous, because each can change the answer to the other.

The upshot is that specialist sanctions-compliance advice in your own jurisdiction belongs beside the Belarusian dispute advice from day one, not bolted on at the end. The parties who navigate this well treat the recovery and the compliance as a single combined question — how do we obtain a result we are both able to enforce and permitted to collect — rather than solving one and tripping over the other. This article addresses the Belarusian side of that equation; the compliance side is yours to take advice on in parallel.

The mistakes that cost recoveries

A few errors keep cropping up in the Belarus-related disputes and each of them is one that you simply can’t afford to spot late. The first is the automatic Western clause (i.e. reaching for London or Stockholm as a matter of course in a dispute where the other party and the assets are in Belarus). The second is the tendency to pick a forum on the basis of its reputation for fairness rather than on the basis of whether the award can actually be enforced where the money is; a perfectly fair process which results in an unenforceable award has got to be the wrong answer. The third is to treat Law 280-Z and its anti-suit injunction power as just some foreign noise that you can safely ignore, when in fact it is the regime in which the enforcement is required.

The rest of them stem from losing the goal. Treating an anti-suit injunction as either complete theatre or as an automatic defeat rather than as something which you price in. Delaying asset tracing until enforcement, by which time the money has had every opportunity to move. Not preserving the assets during the course of the dispute so that you win the case to an empty account. And at the heart of it all is the fundamental mistake of running the dispute as a contest of legal principle to be won in the most elegant fashion rather than as a collection exercise. The ones who get the money are the ones who never lose sight of the fact that the money is the point, not the award.

The bottom line

Sanctions didn’t shut the courthouse down to Belarus-related disputes; they just diverted it. The parties who do continue to attempt to go down the old path generally end up with an award and no way of actually collecting it. The old Western approach is now the least viable option in many of these cases. The alternative is a more rigorous and more honest approach: work out where the other side’s assets actually are, pick a forum which both sides can use and which will give you an enforceable result (often the IAC at the BelCCI or a genuinely neutral seat rather than London) and take into account the Belarus Law 280-Z regime and the new 2026 procedural code as live elements of the game rather than just as footnotes.

Whether you are drafting a clause, weighing where to start a claim, or already caught between two forums, the move that pays off is to think about enforcement first and everything else second. Our team advises on international arbitration and cross-border disputes involving Belarusian parties — from forum strategy and suing a Belarusian company to protecting assets and enforcing the result — and can help you find the path that actually ends in a recovery rather than a framed award.