In theory a court could oblige former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to pay the debt of the United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UESU) Corporation to the Defense Ministry of Russia instead of the Ukrainian government, First Deputy Head of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Renat Kuzmin has said.

"In theory it is possible to oblige Tymoshenko to pay the debt via court, but we have to find her property for this. She declares only an apartment in Dnipropetrovsk which has been arrested under the investigation into the gas case long ago… A court will decide whether Tymoshenko should be punished for these debts. As you know the materials of the UESU case and the Scherban case [the criminal case on the murder of parliamentarian Yevhen Scherban] have been united and will be passed to court as one case," Kuzmin said in an interview with the Segodnya daily newspaper.

As reported, the Russian Defense Ministry filed at Kyiv Economic Court a lawsuit against the Ukrainian government for the non-payment of UAH 3.239 billion under a criminal case on the activities of the UESU Corporation. The plaintiff also asked the court to summon the State Treasury Service of Ukraine as a third party on the side of the defendant in the case. The UESU is also a third party on the side of the defendant in the case.

The Russian ministry claims that, in the 1990s, the UESU, which was then headed by Yulia Tymoshenko, failed to meet its commitments on supplies for the Russian military under a 1997 agreement. The then Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko allegedly provided state guarantees that the commitments would be fulfilled.

UESU representative Oleksandr Kovalchuk said in court that Lazarenko had made promises that the UESU would meet its commitments in letters, and that they could not be legally qualified as state guarantees. Kovalchuk also said that alleged pressure from the Ukrainian government had prevented the UESU from fulfilling its commitments.

The Ukrainian government representatives also told the court there had been no state guarantees and argued that the statute of limitations made the suit invalid.

On September 19, 2012 Kyiv Economic Court partially satisfied a suit from the Russian Defense Ministry concerning a debt accumulated by the UESU, ordering Ukraine to pay UAH 3.11 billion ($400 million) to Russia's defense agency.

The High Economic Court of Ukraine upheld rulings by Kyiv Economic Court and Kyiv Economic Court of Appeals obliging the Ukrainian government to pay over UAH 3.1 billion (about $390 million) in debts of the UESU Corporation to the Russian Defense Ministry.

On January 18, 2013, Ukraine's Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka said that the Ukrainian government has started paying the debt of the UESU to the Russian Defense Ministry under a ruling of Kyiv Court of Appeals. According to him, Ukraine has paid UAH 15 million to Russia.

Pshonka also announced that the criminal case on the murder of parliamentarian Yevhen Scherban and the criminal case on the embezzlement of public funds to repay debts of the UESU to the Russian Defense Ministry have been united in one case.