Amendments to Ukraine's Criteria for Critically Important Enterprises: Key Changes and Implications

On 19 September 2025, an Order of the Ministry of Economy, Environment, and Agriculture of Ukraine became effective, introducing amendments to the Criteria for Determining Enterprises, Institutions, and Organizations of Importance to the National Economy.

First of all, this Order prohibits recognizing enterprises as critically important to the economy if special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions) have been applied to them or to their founder, participant, shareholder, or ultimate beneficial owner in accordance with the Law of Ukraine “On Sanctions” dated 14.08.2014, as well as if the founder, participant, shareholder, or ultimate beneficial owner of the enterprise is the Russian Federation, the Republic of Belarus, FATF blacklisted countries, or a citizen of these countries (except for those who permanently reside in Ukraine on legal grounds).

In addition, the following changes were made to the Criteria:

  • the criterion regarding wages has been excluded, namely, the clause on the amount of the average wages accrued to insured persons-employees has been removed. Therefore, in order to qualify as critically important, enterprises must apply the general provisions on wages from the Criteria;
  • the criterion regarding dominant market position of the enterprise has been excluded;
  • from now on only grants awarded under Resolution No. 739 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine will will entitle recipients to obtain critically important status;
  • the certificates from the State Tax Service confirming the absence of debt are provided for the primary and non-primary tax registration places of a legal entity and its separate divisions;
  • the criterion regarding the conduct of independent expert reviews of Draft Regulatory and Legal Acts on economic issues, foreign economic relations, and other issues related to the rights and interests of entrepreneurs has been added;
  • new is the definition of criteria for permanent representative offices of foreign media, which will be able to count on status of being critically important, for example, subject to accreditation from an authorized unit (person) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Overall, the updated Criteria are designed to minimize manipulation while providing greater opportunities for areas that are important to the economy.

We will closely monitor further developments in this area and will report on this in future Legal News.