The Russian State Duma may adopt a law recognising the consequences of sanctions as force majeure. In this way, the legislator is trying to specifically regulate the relations of market participants affected by restrictions imposed by foreign states and international organisations.
Dmitry Uryakin, Associate at Maxima Legal, suggested that the law would not have a significant impact on the relationship of traders and would not seriously change the "rules of the game". In the expert's opinion there are several reasons for this.
"First, the legislator still does not recognise sanctions as a circumstance of force majeure "by default". On the contrary, it directs the market participants and the law enforcer to a careful application of the rules on exemption from liability for breach of obligations, in situations where the restrictive measures have actually had a negative impact on the ability to fulfil the contract.
Secondly, as before, the person subjected to the restrictive measures will have to prove that they have proved to be extraordinary and unavoidable for him/her. This has been a major difficulty in practice. In this part, the draft law does not bring any changes.
Thirdly, the draft law does not protect those indirectly affected by the sanctions. For example, it does not protect distributors of goods who purchase them for sale not from foreign suppliers, but from suppliers in Russia. Such distributors' obligations to Russian customers may also not be enforced; however, such non-enforcement is not caused by restrictive measures, but by the actions of their domestic counterparties which cannot purchase the goods abroad, which, according to the Civil Code, does not exclude distributor liability," Dmitry explained to CRE magazine.
