With a Star Wars style acronym – RD4U – the ‘Register of Damage Caused by the Aggression of the Russian Federation Against Ukraine’, to give it its official name, is now completely open for business. All 43 categories of claims for compensation for “damage, loss or injury caused by the internationally wrongful acts of the Russian Federation in or against Ukraine, starting on or after 24 February 2022” can now be submitted by individuals, companies or the state of Ukraine.
The Register started in April 2024 and is part of a complex interconnected set of structures including a ‘Claims Commission’ which – when it gets the ratifications needed from states – will subsume the Register into itself as one component, and continue to process claims, then adjudicate upon them, while waiting for the final cog in the machine to be added: a payment system.
There’s little comparison with other claims mechanisms developed by treaty over the years, except maybe for scale, the UN Compensation Commission that dealt with post Iraq invasion of Kuwait processing more than 2 million claims over 11 years. This one has been built at rapid speed. Distinctively, it was created during the hostilities rather than after and operates digitally via app.
“It's one of the maybe underappreciated aspects of our work,” says the Register executive director Markiyan Kliuchkovskyi. “We don't have a precedent to rely on for how to build a mechanism while the war not only is ongoing, but in many ways is as intense as at any point in the past almost 5 years.” The different challenges include availability of documentation, and the fact that “some evidence is simply lost,” he notes. “It's already becoming, at times, difficult to reconstruct events in the beginning of the war in 2022. So, from that perspective, I feel quite justified that we have started work early.”
The RD4U is based in The Hague, where so much of the old and new architecture of international justice is being created. It is completely separate from the new Special Tribunal on Aggression against Ukraine, “politically and virtually in any other way,” stresses Kliuchkovskyi. “They have different mandates, different purposes, different memberships.” He acknowledges that both are “under the Council of Europe umbrella” and in The Hague. But the special tribunal “is a mechanism for individual criminal liability, whereas the compensation mechanism, including the register, is meant to pursue state liability for violations of international law”.
200.000 claims to date
Kliuchkovskyi sits in a small office in the international zone of the Dutch city, a stone's throw from Europol, Eurojust, and the former premises of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As we comment on the blandness of the furniture visible in the zoom chat, he replies: “I don't know if it's IKEA. We inherited it from the previous landlord in this space, and we haven't bothered to change it, because that's all we need. Our physical presence is kept lean on purpose. As we semi-joke, our magic happens in the digital realm.”
In that realm the register has received more than 200,000 claims to date. There are now 21 categories open for individuals, 11 categories for legal entities and 11 categories for the State of Ukraine. “If somebody would have told me that, three and a half years from inception, we would be at this place, I would have been quite happy. We are no longer a concept, we're no longer a project, we are a properly functioning organization that is starting to deliver in earnest on its mandate,” says Kliuchkovskyi.
200,000 claims may look small when set against the millions expected. Nevertheless “it's a population of a medium-sized town. It's 200,000 people who have suffered real damage, real pain and loss, and who have taken a leap of faith to get their thoughts and materials together, go through the process, and submit a claim to a new mechanism, a new organization. So that should not be discounted as small by any means,” says Kliuchkovskyi, who expects “the numbers of victims to be in the millions”.
Limited mandate and security concerns
Ukraine’s transitional justice experts are engaging with this mechanism but they have their critiques. “The bigger concern” is the “obvious injustice” that Russia's invasion started in 2014 and that the Register works only on 2022 onwards, says Kateryna Busol of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), an NGO, who still finds “admirable that survivors have managed to respond in a very nuanced and empathetic way, still believing in the institution and believing in the good faith and goodwill” while campaigning for the Register to expand its temporal jurisdiction back to 2014.
“Whether we like it or not, our statute gives a very clear answer and sets a very clear boundary to our mandate. We simply cannot deal with anything that has happened prior to 24th of February 2022,” says Kliuchkovskyi. “Our member states do see that and understand that. And when it comes to the Claims Commission, some steps have been taken to address that by specifically indicating in the text of the Convention that the mandate of the Commission can be expanded to include events after 2014. But that's a question for the future and a decision that has to be made there.”
All Ukrainians who have suffered damage can apply, including those who are currently living under Russian occupation. “A digital, electronic way of submission claims is partly the answer to security concerns,” says Kliuchkovskyi, “because you do not have to be physically present to have access. It is not necessarily always easy to do, and requires at the very least, some technical skill, using VPN.” But he says they are getting claims in from the occupied territories even if not quite in the “density” as those from the government-controlled territory. With the dangers the statistics are not public for security reasons. “We do know that the Russian authorities have designated the Register to be an undesirable organization under Russian law. Which means that anybody who as much as interacts with us could potentially be subjected to sanctions and penalties and whatnot. So our message to people in the occupied territories is that security is paramount, and that should take precedence over anything else. Folks should not compromise their security just for the sake of attempting to submit a claim to us. We always remind people that. For now, and as long as the war continues, there will not be a deadline to submit claims. There may be a better moment for submitting a claim, if security is a concern.”
Getting the word out
Getting the word out about the Register while the conflict is ongoing is “a challenge,” says Law Professor Chiara Giorgetti of Richmond University, in the US, and the vice-chair of the Board of the Register. “What is important is to provide information to possible claimants that the process exists. Maybe people currently have different priorities, because they have to make sure that they have something to eat, and then they have a shelter, and there’s limited electricity so I understand that it may be difficult for people to find the time, or to get the time, but I think it's important” for them to file claims.
“That is really one of the underappreciated elements that puts that number of 200,000 in a particular context,” says Kliuchkovskyi. “There's certainly a benefit of doing that now, while the recollections are fresh, while the evidence is still there. But there also will be a moment for that in the future, where there's more headspace, if you will, for the submission of these claims. This is a long-term process, and what we're doing now is really using the borrowed time, where any other mechanism would not even think about starting what we've been doing”. “These are important steps,” says Yelyzaveta Sokurenko, Head of Documentation Department at Ukrainian human rights NGO ZMINA, but “we also need to be realistic about what these mechanisms can achieve…and about expectations. People have already been waiting for justice for years, and we need to be very careful not to give them the impression that submitting a claim means they will necessarily receive compensation, or that this will happen anytime soon”.
Busol says the perception of the Register differs between various survivors. “If we compare Ukraine to the global practice, survivors of conflict-related sexual violence have been very active in terms of their visibility, in terms of their engagement with policymaking and international advocacy. They are far more aware about various justice avenues, including the Register.” She cautions, however, on how to help a survivor of a sexual crime to apply. Kliuchkovskyi says that from the feedback they are getting from Ukraine, the sexual and gender-based crime categories of harm “are not easy categories, and they were not expected to be easy”. The Register has “made the submission process and the requirements for what can be or should be submitted, as simple and as flexible as possible with no strict requirement for any particular form of documentation or evidence. It is literally anything that a claimant feels capable or able to provide, even if it is just a personal recollection of events. We understand that physical evidence is not necessarily there, at the time of submission. So really, anything that can be provided in a form that is, we hope, as humane as a legal form can be”.
He acknowledges that civil society organizations can “provide support to these individuals in terms of advice, information, even something as trivial or substantive as just sitting next to the claimant while the claimant is filling that form and submitting a claim”. “We know that in these categories people are not always willing to come forward and to submit those claims, and when they do they may not be willing to repeat information,” he continues. “So, another thing that we are attempting to do is we're trying to minimize the need for the claimant to restate again and again what had happened to them. So, if they've already made a statement to law enforcement, or to the UN monitoring mission, or to an NGO, to not force them say those things again, but rather use the material that they had already given with respect to what had happened to them.”
Transitioning to a Commission
The next stage of the claims work will be the commission to be established on the basis of a convention that was signed in The Hague in December 2025. As of now, that convention has 41 signatories – 40 states and the European Union. Now it’s up to individual states to ratify the Convention in accordance with their national laws. 11 of those certifications have been completed, says Kliuchkovskyi. “The magic number here is 25.” That’s the number needed for the convention to enter into force. “So we are in waiting mode, while these national procedures are ongoing.” He tentatively predicts early 2027, when pushed.
And then there’s the money side. Busol notes that Ukraine’s budget is very stretched, with many competing priorities for the money currently being loaned by the EU. Kliuchkovskyi explains that the costs of the Commission are known because it's the annual budget of the Register. But the decision that needs to be made by member states of the commission is whether 25 sign-ups is “big enough and strong enough to sustain the financing”. Giorgetti looks to “main countries” like UK, France, Germany, and Italy plus the EU. “When they are confident in that,” says Kliuchkovskyi, “they can make a decision that triggers the actual operations of the commission, where the transition from the register to the commission happens, when my team changes their hats and starts calling themselves a commission.” And in the end the plan is that Russia funds the actual compensation.
“After the war ends, there will be a reasonable period of time to submit a claim. There's no first-in, first-out principle, there's no particular weight that is given to claims that are submitted first,” the executive director says. But he also wishes the future commission not to become “an unbearable burden for our member states. And that includes, a very stark and very clear and head-on understanding that we are not going to be a standing court or a standing organization. We have our mandate, and when we exhaust it, we will have to shut down. So we do everything with that in mind, that we will shut down at some point”.
