The subject matter of this dispute is the claim of a discharged service member to recover from a military unit average earnings for the entire period of delay in the final settlement upon discharge for the period from June 15, 2017, to December 23, 2023.
**** In its decision, the Supreme Court referred to the key legal position of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court dated October 8, 2025, which departed from previous conclusions and ruled that even after the statutory limitation of the recovery of average earnings to six months, courts are still obliged to apply the principle of proportionality and commensurability of compensation to the amount of the principal debt. The judges noted that the lengthy period of delay in payment to the plaintiff must be divided into two stages—before the entry into force of the new legislative amendments (July 19, 2022) and thereafter, applying separate calculation rules to each period. The panel of judges stated that the courts of previous instances had erred, as they based their calculation solely on the arrears of the health improvement allowance, completely ignoring the unpaid indexation of the monetary allowance. Furthermore, the lower courts failed to apply the mandatory proportionality formula, under which the percentage of average earnings must strictly correspond to the percentage of untimely paid funds relative to the total amount due upon discharge. Due to these miscalculations, the courts did not establish the actual financial figures, without which it is impossible to determine a fair and lawful amount of compensation. Since the Supreme Court is limited in its authority to independently collect evidence and perform primary mathematical calculations, there arose a need for a repeated detailed examination of the case materials.
The Supreme Court partially granted the cassation appeal of the plaintiff’s representative, vacated the decisions of the courts of first and appellate instances, and remanded the case for a new trial to the Dnipropetrovsk District Administrative Court.
