Sayenko Kharenko at the IBA Annual Conference 2026, Copenhagen

We have been coming to the IBA Annual Conference every year since 2011. This October it is Copenhagen, from the 4th to the 9th, and seven of Sayenko Kharenko’s team members will be there for the full week.

Cross-border work rests on people who are rarely in the same room. Those relationships are not maintained over email, they are kept up in person, in an hour set aside on purpose, which is why the meetings go into our diary before anything else that week.

The week itself is only part of it. Much of the groundwork is laid over the rest of the year, inside the committees where the IBA does its work.

On the programme this year

Nazar Chernyavsky has been part of the leadership of the IBA Technology Law Committee since 2020: first as vice chair, then as co-chair through 2024 and 2025, and now on its Advisory Board.

In Copenhagen he chairs the session “Digital sovereignty, sovereign clouds and data embassies” on Wednesday 7 October at 11:15, on whether national and regional clouds can be kept secure from foreign interference, and whether, for countries facing attack or invasion, keeping critical data at home is a safeguard or a vulnerability.

He also co-moderates Open Ukraine 2026, the Ukrainian Bar Association breakfast held each year during the conference. This year’s edition is on Ukraine as a leader in defence innovation, and takes place on Monday 5 October, 07:30–09:30 at the Bella Center. It is open to registered IBA delegates.

Tymur Enkhbaiar speaks on “Foreign investment restrictions on controlling agricultural land”, on Wednesday 7 October at 16:15, in a session chaired by colleagues from the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Our delegation

Our team members cover the ground most cross-border work touches: corporate and M&A, banking and finance, international arbitration, cross-border disputes and investigations, antitrust, white-collar defence, real estate and infrastructure.

Defence is where we are putting particular weight this year, and both co-heads of the practice group will be in Copenhagen. Nazar Chernyavsky works the financing side of the sector: he supervises the firm’s mandates for the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, among them the first transaction completed under Denmark’s guarantee scheme for investment into the Ukrainian defence industry. Dmytro Riabikin advises Ukrainian and foreign defence companies on structuring investments into the sector, on export control, and on the needs of miltech companies and the venture investors backing them.