Russia’s Supreme Court chief says Russian courts are the best place to seek justice
Russia’s Supreme Court chief Igor Krasnov argued in an article published by the Russian business outlet RBC that foreign judicial systems offer no guarantee of impartiality or objectivity, and that Russian businesses had learned this firsthand in recent years. The full text is available to subscribers.
Litigation in foreign jurisdictions, Krasnov wrote, “more closely resembles poker,” with outcomes often shaped by “a pre-prepared strategy, evidentiary maneuvers that sometimes border on cheating, and even the element of surprise.”
Russia’s judicial system, by contrast, he compared to “a chess match, where the pieces are visible, the rules are transparent, and the decision-making space is bounded by clear logic.” Russian courts, he argued, are “the best place to seek justice.”
Krasnov listed several advantages of Russian jurisdiction: a high degree of predictability grounded in judicial precedent; an advanced level of digitization that reduces court costs, speeds up proceedings, and allows remote participation; and the enforceability of court rulings. Decisions issued by foreign courts, he wrote, “prove de facto unenforceable due to sanctions restrictions, with dim prospects of recovering even minimal court costs.”
“The call to choose Russian jurisdiction for litigation is not an advertisement of its universal appeal, nor is it competition with London or New York. It is an objective reality, defined by adherence to the law and fairness in decision-making — and all the changes being carried out in the domestic judicial system are aimed at achieving exactly that,” Krasnov wrote.
Krasnov became head of Russia’s Supreme Court in September 2025, after spending five years as Prosecutor General. Under his leadership, the office aggressively pursued the nationalization of assets: since the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, lawsuits filed by the Prosecutor General’s Office have resulted in the seizure of 550 private companies with assets worth nearly four trillion rubles.
Krasnov’s family acquired nearly 1.5 billion rubles’ worth of real estate during the war, according to an investigation by the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which was founded by Alexey Navalny.
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