Oleksandr Tupytskyi: Five years of stalemate in the legal tug‑of‑war between Kyiv and Vienna

More than five years after the indictment was filed, the criminal proceedings against Oleksandr Tupytskyi, the former president of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court, have still not been substantively heard.

According to his own statements, the defendant lives in Austria, and a Viennese court rejected his extradition to Ukraine in 2023. The next hearing in Kyiv was scheduled for 13 October 2026.

Background

Tupytskyj is accused of violations of Articles 384 paragraph 2 and 386 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code: knowingly false statements and influencing a witness.

The allegations are linked to a case concerning the appropriation of assets of the electromechanical plant Sujiw in the Donetsk region. According to investigators, Tupytskyj allegedly tried in October 2018 to bribe a witness so that the witness would refuse to testify or change his testimony in favor of the former president of the Supreme Economic Court, Viktor Tatkov.

A second charge concerns Tupytskyj's own statements from 2018 and 2019, which investigators consider to be fabricated. These are expressly allegations, not facts established by a court.

The indictment has been with the Podil District Court in Kyiv since May 2021. According to Ukrainian court reports, delays already occurred before the start of the Russian full-scale invasion due to absent parties, health issues and requests for recusal.

Since 2022, the presence of the defendant living in Austria has been a central obstacle to continuing the case. The court already ordered a search notice in May 2022, as reported by the medium Sudovyj Reporter.

New Facts

The currently circulating claim that the proceedings have been continuously in the preparatory hearing for five years cannot be sustained based on the sources. According to Sudovyj Reporter, this procedural phase was already completed on 15 November 2021, with the substantive hearing scheduled for 1 December 2021. At the same time, the court imposed a bail of 45,000 hryvnia, roughly 1,000 euros. The assertion that no procedural safeguard measure was ordered is therefore incorrect.

A report from Watchers in December 2021 additionally confirms that the bail was indeed deposited, but the planned hearing had to be postponed. The court simultaneously relaxed contact restrictions with witnesses: conversations were allowed, but discussion of the criminal proceedings itself remained prohibited. Scheduling the hearing and the actual taking of evidence were thus two separate, temporally distinct steps in the process.

In September 2026, Tupytskyi's lawyer Maksym Bacharjev told Watchers that the substantive hearing has not yet begun. The defence now relies on the statute of limitations having expired. The district court Podil only confirmed to the medium that the matter is in judicial proceedings and listed 13 October 2026 as the next date.

Reactions

A Viennese court rejected the extradition of Tupytskyi to Ukraine in May 2023, as reported by the medium Graty. The full reasoning for the decision is not available in open sources. It is publicly known only that the war in Ukraine was cited as the reason for refusal. The available information does not allow the conclusion that the Austrian court dismissed the charges on the merits or classified them as politically motivated.

The Austrian Ministry of Justice explained in March 2023 to Ukrainian media the general line of comparable decisions: the war endangers the lives and health of people in Ukrainian detention facilities, which creates a risk of violating Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman treatment. Every extradition request is examined individually, the ministry emphasized.

In the case of entrepreneur Oleh Bachmatjuk, whose extradition was also denied by a Viennese court, a court spokesperson, according to Ukrinform, additionally referred to the unpredictable course of the war and possible deteriorations of detention conditions even outside the main combat zones. Ukrainian assurances could not eliminate the risk.

For Austrian and European observers, the Tupytskyi case is an example of how the war in Ukraine affects judicial cooperation between EU states and Kyiv: several Austrian courts have refused extraditions of Ukrainian citizens since 2022, citing Article 3 of the ECHR, including, besides Tupytskyi, the agribusiness entrepreneur Oleh Bachmatjuk.

This specifically concerns the question of how EU member states handle mutual legal assistance requests from a country at war, regardless of the outcome of the respective criminal proceedings in Ukraine itself.