Back on August 17, 2026, the defense in the Rotterdam+ case moved to recuse Judge Tetiana Lytvynko, who is hearing the case alone. The case is at the merits stage — the court is examining the prosecution's written evidence and the covert-investigation materials.

The grounds are nothing new: the defense questions the judge's impartiality, contending that her conduct shows favoritism toward the prosecution. The defense argues that she is helping the prosecutor during the examination of evidence and nudging him to change the prosecution's theory.

The recusal motion was heard by another judge who, according to the ruling in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, denied the recusal of Judge Lytvynko. For now the case proceeds as usual, albeit with some delays owing to air-raid alerts in Kyiv.

This is far from the lawyers' first attempt to recuse the judge or the prosecutor — which, once again, may point to efforts to drag out the proceedings by abusing procedural rights.

The Rotterdam+ case concerns events of 2016–2019, when top officials of DTEK and the National Energy and Utilities Regulatory Commission adopted an unlawful resolution and applied the "Rotterdam+" formula — meant for pricing imported coal — to Ukrainian coal. The state suffered over UAH 38 billion in losses, while the private joint-stock company DTEK reaped windfall profits.

The pre-trial investigation ran for almost five years, and the case was repeatedly closed and reopened — as we covered in a separate piece.

The HACC moved to the merits stage back in April 2025, when Judge Lytvynko began hearing the case alone. The actual hearing, however, could not get underway for a long time — held up by recusal motions against the judge and the prosecutor, along with a series of defense motions aimed at dragging out the proceedings. The defense, for example, asked to send the case back to the preparatory-proceedings stage because of the change of judge.

One recusal, for example, was filed over the single-judge format. The lawyers argued that, since the case had first been heard by a panel — before the change in the law (Law No. 3655-IX) — the hearing should have resumed before a panel after the previous judge's recusal, not before a single judge. Logically, though, a single-judge hearing should, if anything, speed things up.

Another recusal was filed because the judge refused to consider a motion for temporary access right away. The judge, it was claimed, limited the lawyer's speaking time while letting the prosecutor speak at length; she also denied the lawyer the right of reply and put "sympathetic" questions to the prosecutor, such as: "Are you mentally ready?" This, the defense argued, showed the court siding with the prosecution.

Recusal motions against the prosecutor were filed on several grounds too: that he summarized the indictment in just 20 minutes, without detailing the role of each of the many defendants; that he failed to disclose the covert-investigation materials and refused to sever the case against two of the defenants into separate proceedings; and that he had previously investigated this same case at the pre-trial stage. The court denied them all.

Hearings are held fairly often — sometimes three or four times a week. This owes to the risk that the statute of limitations will run out. For the first count (abuse of office), it expires in 2027; for the second (official negligence), the limitation period has already passed. A number of the defendants — NEURC officials, specifically — have already been released from liability.

Even so, defense counsel ask the court to avoid an "overly hasty hearing," which, they say, would harm the objectivity of the proceedings and risk making them superficial. Three hearings a week, the lawyers argue, do not give the defense enough time to prepare for them.

Given that only the examination of the prosecution's evidence is currently underway, the defense's constant recusals and the delays they cause make it almost impossible to finish the trial within the limitation period. The case's fate, then, turns on whether the court can effectively counter the abuse of procedural rights and manage to hand down a verdict before time runs out for good.