Press Center: Legal updates

In Resolution No. 59-P dated 13 October 2026, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation held that an employer may not refuse to pay a severance payment (compensation) provided for in an employment contract solely on the grounds that the employee is resigning voluntarily. This ruling reinforces the significance of contractual employee guarantees and requires employers to take a more careful approach to negotiating terms regarding payments upon the termination of an employment relationship.

On 24 March 2025, the State Duma adopted, at the third reading, Draft Law No. 1097621-8 (the “Draft Law”), which prohibits employers from imposing a probationary period on women with children under the age of three.

On August 11, 2025, amendments to the Labor Code of the Russian Federation (hereinafter referred to as the "LC of the RF") entered into force. These amendments concern the provision of guarantees to part-time employees upon termination of an employment contract with them at their primary place of work due to the liquidation of the organization or redundancy or staff cuts at the organization.

Starting from 2021 bankruptcy of foreign legal entities in Russian commercial courts has been actively developing. Most of the judgments were issued by courts of appeal and cassation stages and then confirmed by “refusal” rulings of the Supreme Court. It is also interesting that such bankruptcy proceedings were initiated by either Russian state bodies or Russian legal entities.

Electronic document management in the area of labour relations is not new and has been actively used by companies for years already.

On July 2, 2021, the Resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court No. 18 dated June 22, 2021, “On some issues of the procedure of pre-trial settlement of the disputes considered in civil and arbitration proceedings” was published. It is worth saying that the Court, making interpretations on different issues, infrequently turns to this question.

The Judicial Chamber on Civil Cases in its recent Ruling1 once again consolidated guarantees to employees and placed their rights and position above the interests of the employer.

Federal Law No. 407-FZ dated December 8, 2020 made material amendments to the section of the Labor Code of the Russian Federation which regulates distance work. The necessity for such amendments became evident as soon as employers started to switch their staff to work from home in large numbers at the beginning of 2020.

In its recent review of judicial practice on employment cases by Russian courts², the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation (the Supreme Court) defined legal strategies that should be guided when considering disputes related to the termination of an employment contract at the employer’s initiative. Below we consider the main conclusions of the Supreme Court.