Direct answers on establishing facts about Ukrainian counterparties, on where sanctions and due-diligence obligations converge, and on how Salient One works. Where an answer depends on something that cannot be settled from the public record, it says so.
An EDRPOU number is the eight-digit identifier assigned to every legal entity registered in Ukraine, issued under the Unified State Register of Enterprises and Organisations of Ukraine. It is the equivalent of a company registration number and is the only reliable way to identify a Ukrainian company, because company names are frequently duplicated, transliterated inconsistently, and changed. Always ask a Ukrainian counterparty for its EDRPOU rather than relying on the trading name.
Start with the EDRPOU number and look the entity up in Ukraine's Unified State Register (EDR), which records legal status, registered address, directors and declared beneficial owners. Confirm the entity is active rather than in liquidation or bankruptcy, check the Minjust bankruptcy register, and check the company's filing history with the tax authority. Registration confirms legal existence only. It says nothing about whether the company can actually perform.
Ukraine's Unified State Register requires companies to declare their ultimate beneficial owners, so the declared UBO is the starting point. It is not the finishing point. Declared ownership is self-reported, and Ukrainian corporate structures have been reshaped by de-oligarchisation, wartime nationalisations and transfers from sanctioned individuals to nominees. Establishing real control means traversing the ownership chain across current and historical records, including foreign layers, and testing declared owners against sanctions and political-exposure data.
It is genuinely useful and has improved substantially since the 2014 reforms, but it should be treated as a declaration rather than a verified fact. Ownership data is self-reported, and residual Russian-connected ownership exposure has not been fully cleansed from the Ukrainian corporate landscape. Use the register as the first layer of evidence and corroborate it against historical filings, related-party structures, procurement behaviour and sanctions data before relying on it for a decision.
Prozorro is Ukraine's public electronic procurement system, and its published tender and award data is one of the most useful open sources on Ukrainian company behaviour: who bid, who won, at what value, and how often. The data itself is reliable as a record of what happened in the system. What it does not tell you is whether an award reflects genuine capacity, whether contracts were performed, or whether a bidding pattern indicates collusion. It operates under Ukrainian procurement law as amended under martial law, with separate thresholds for defence-related and critical infrastructure procurement.
Screen the entity and every declared beneficial owner against the EU consolidated list, US OFAC SDN, UK FCDO and UN Security Council lists, and separately against Ukraine's own NACP sanctions registry, which lists designations under Ukrainian law that do not appear on EU or US lists. Screen names in both Ukrainian and transliterated forms, since a single Ukrainian name can be romanised several ways. Free screening across 18 official sources is available at s1.salientone.eu.
A single Ukrainian name can appear in Cyrillic, in several competing Latin transliterations, in a legacy Russian-derived romanisation, and in an abbreviated legal form, all referring to the same entity. Company names are also widely duplicated. Exact-string screening therefore produces both false negatives, where a designated party is missed because the spelling differs, and false positives, where unrelated entities share a common name. Reliable matching needs fuzzy, phonetic and transliteration-aware comparison, anchored on the EDRPOU identifier wherever one exists.
Ukraine publishes court decisions in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, which allows a company's litigation history to be reconstructed, and the Ministry of Justice maintains a bankruptcy register. Tax and social-contribution debt is recorded by the State Tax Service. Together these give a reasonable picture of financial distress and dispute exposure. They are Ukrainian-language sources and require reading in the original: machine translation regularly mistakes party roles in court records.
The public record cannot settle this. A registered address proves a filing, not a functioning plant. Verification means someone going to the coordinates and establishing what is physically there: whether the facility exists, its visible condition, whether it is operating, how accessible it is, and its exposure to power, transport and infrastructure disruption. In a conflict environment a desk-based questionnaire is structurally inadequate for this, and mine contamination makes unstructured site visits unsafe.
Sometimes, and proximity alone does not answer it. What matters is the specific exposure: distance from the contact line, whether the facility sits in occupied or contested territory, its dependence on grid power, the state of transport links, workforce availability given conscription, and the terms of any war-risk insurance. These are assessable, but they need current geographic data and local enquiry rather than a national-level risk rating.
No. List screening is a necessary first step and a common point of failure, because it only catches parties that have been designated by name. It does not catch exposure held through an ownership chain, entities controlled by designated persons without being listed themselves, circumvention structures, or secondary effects. Sanctions compliance requires ownership and control analysis on top of screening. A match is also only a candidate for review, never a determination of identity.
Under EU practice, an entity is caught where a designated person holds more than 50% of the proprietary rights or a majority interest, and separately where a designated person exercises control regardless of shareholding. Control can arise through board appointment rights, veto rights, or the ability to direct the entity in practice. This is why a screening hit rate of zero on the entity itself is not sufficient: the analysis has to run through the ownership chain to the ultimate beneficial owner.
The twentieth package of Russia-related restrictive measures, adopted 23 April 2026, activated an anti-circumvention tool against Kyrgyzstan, introduced a new Article 5sa reporting obligation on the use of intellectual property, imposed a categorical ban on Russian crypto-asset service providers, restricted managed security services, and excluded twenty additional Russian banks. For Ukraine-exposed companies, the practical effect is that residual Russian ownership chains and the circulation of sanctions-relevant material now require analytical work beyond list screening.
Frequently, yes, and this is routinely underestimated. Regulation (EU) 2021/821 is operationally salient well beyond defence: semiconductors, software with cryptographic functions, industrial machinery, components applicable to unmanned aerial vehicles, telecommunications equipment and surveillance technology all arise in reconstruction and resilience projects. A dual-use posture calibrated for peacetime commercial supply generally needs re-examining before deploying the same goods into Ukraine.
The World Bank's successive Rapid Damage and Needs Assessments place recovery costs above $480 billion. Financing is multilayered: the EU Ukraine Facility provides EUR 50 billion through 2027, alongside EBRD, EIB, IFC and World Bank co-financing across energy, transport, housing, municipal infrastructure and industrial recovery, bilateral G7 instruments, and blended-finance vehicles. Tenders are published through Prozorro and through the development finance institutions' own procurement portals.
Not always, and the gaps matter. Projects backed by development finance institutions run under their own frameworks, such as the EBRD Procurement Policies and Rules or the World Bank Procurement Regulations, which do not always align with each other or with Ukrainian domestic procurement requirements. Companies entering through DFI-backed or EU Facility-funded projects therefore face a doubled compliance layer: IFC Performance Standards, the EBRD Environmental and Social Policy and the EU procurement framework at project level, on top of their own corporate compliance.
Four recur. Payments and currency: National Bank of Ukraine capital controls, foreign-exchange restrictions, unpredictable settlement timelines and hryvnia convertibility constraints. Labour: conscription removing working-age men, internally displaced workforces and forced-labour indicators in informal chains. Insurance: expensive war-risk cover, narrowed coverage and multiplied exclusions. Dispute resolution: martial law affects court operation, judgment enforceability and arbitration. Each of these is an operational constraint that shapes whether a contract can actually be performed.
The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive applies directly to EU companies with more than 5,000 employees and EUR 1.5 billion worldwide turnover, and to non-EU companies with EUR 1.5 billion of EU turnover. National transposition is due by 26 July 2028, application begins 26 July 2029, and first disclosures follow from 1 January 2030. Penalties are capped at 3% of net worldwide turnover. Companies below the thresholds are still affected in practice, because in-scope customers push the requirements down their supply chains.
No, and treating it as the default is one of the more common errors. The CSDDD does not endorse withdrawal as uniformly compliant, and disengagement may itself produce adverse human rights impacts that the framework expects a company to weigh. What is defensible is a documented, principled decision, reached through a process that can be shown afterwards. Disengagement needs documenting as carefully as engagement.
No. Standard human rights and environmental due diligence questionnaires assume a supplier that can answer accurately and a verification route that can test the answers. In a conflict-affected market both assumptions weaken: self-reported responses cannot be corroborated at distance, and the risks that matter, such as frontline proximity, grid dependence, mine contamination and conscription-driven labour shortages, do not appear on a standard form. Due diligence has to be calibrated to the environment rather than transplanted into it.
Because they converge on the same decision. Most compliance functions staff them as three separate workstreams, but in a Ukraine-relevant value chain they meet at a single supplier-onboarding decision, a single procurement bid, or a single financing arrangement. Assessed separately, each workstream can clear a counterparty that the combined picture would not. The practical response is one integrated view per counterparty rather than three parallel files.
Salient One is an intelligence company based in Kyiv that holds three capabilities together: strategy, meaning where a position is worth taking and on what terms; intelligence, meaning the Ukrainian public record engineered into a connected evidence base with source and date on every fact; and operations, meaning the ability to establish on the ground what the record cannot settle. It is an engineering company rather than a consultancy: the system is the product, and judgement sits around it.
No. Salient One is an intelligence company. Its reports support commercial, procurement, investment, partnership and operational decisions, and each states its scope, sources, confidence level and limitations. They do not replace legal, tax, accounting, investment, sanctions, export-control, engineering, valuation, insurance or security advice. Where specialist review is needed, the report says so and flags it for escalation. Regulatory frameworks are context the work is read against, not a service line.
Ukraine 1 is Salient One's working environment for resolving Ukrainian companies, people, records and relationships into source-traceable evidence. It connects fragmented records while preserving the source, date and limits of what can be established, covering entity resolution across names and transliterations, an ownership and relationship graph, and Kyiv-based research where open sources are insufficient. It is active infrastructure under development, not a finished product or an unrestricted self-service platform.
[S/1] is Salient One's global risk-intelligence platform at s1.salientone.eu. Sanctions and political-exposure screening across 18 official sources, country risk scorecards for over 230 jurisdictions, the global risk map and the source freshness directory are free to use. Paid tiers add full intelligence reports, ownership and network mapping, UBO chains, batch screening, watchlist monitoring, case management with an audit trail, and a REST API.
From official and open sources, each carrying its own provenance. For Ukraine these include the EDR company registry, Prozorro procurement, the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, NACP asset declarations and the NAZK register, State Tax Service filings and debt records, the Ministry of Justice bankruptcy register, OpenSanctions and GDELT adverse media. Globally, [S/1] draws on 18 sanctions and debarment registries and official country indicators from the World Bank, Transparency International, the EC Joint Research Centre, FATF, ILO and others. Every material fact carries its source and its date.
By writing to [email protected] with whatever you have: a company name, an EDRPOU number, a website, site coordinates, relevant documents, or simply a description of what you are trying to understand. The reply sets out what can already be established from the evidence base, what would have to be found out, and what that would be worth. If it becomes an engagement, scope, sources, limitations, confidence and timing are agreed before work starts. Where a question does not warrant the work, we say so.
Traders, factors and forfaiters; lenders, investors and underwriters; M&A and market-entry advisers; reconstruction and industrial contractors; and companies building Ukrainian supply and partnership relationships. The common thread is a consequential decision that turns on facts about a Ukrainian counterparty, site or market that cannot be settled from outside the country.
If what you need to establish is not covered here, write to us. Tell us what you are looking at and we will tell you what can already be established, what would have to be found out, and what that would be worth.