The cross-border effect of Russia's re­hab­il­it­a­tion agree­ment: A struc­tur­al gap in the con­flict of laws

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

D. V. Glazov ex­am­ines wheth­er the re­hab­il­it­a­tion agree­ment in­tro­duced in Russia by Fed­er­al Law No. 253-FZ of 26 July 2026 has any effect out­side the Rus­si­an legal order. The agree­ment binds cred­it­ors who did not sign it and weak­ens the regime for chal­len­ging the debtor's trans­ac­tions, yet both ef­fects were de­signed with do­mest­ic cir­cu­la­tion in mind.

On the author's ana­lys­is, neither uni­form nor conflict-of-laws rules exist for such an agree­ment, and the gap is filled by the courts. The le­gis­lat­or's char­ac­ter­isa­tion of the agree­ment as a modi­fic­a­tion of con­tract under Art­icle 450(2) of the Civil Code sub­jects its cross-border effect to the law gov­ern­ing each mod­i­fied ob­lig­a­tion. Com­par­ing the di­ver­ging ap­proaches of the Eng­lish and US courts in Bakh­shi­yeva and Agrokor, Glazov pro­poses a con­flict rule for re­hab­il­it­a­tion agree­ments that dif­fers from the lex fori con­cursus con­nec­tion dis­cussed in UN­CIT­RAL Work­ing Group V.