Ukraine prepares EU-style pirate-site blocking framework

Ukraine is moving to formalize a legal pathway for blocking pirate sites—while already operating a far broader blocking regime justified by national security.

TorrentFreak reports that, in a submission for the US Trade Representative’s 2026 Special 301 process, the Ukrainian government highlighted proposed copyright amendments designed to implement Article 8(3) of the EU Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC). That article is the workhorse behind European “injunctions against intermediaries,” the legal hook that lets rightsholders obtain court orders compelling ISPs, hosting providers, and other intermediaries to cut access to infringing services.

Ukraine’s submission does not explicitly say “ISP blocking,” but it points to injunctions aimed at online intermediaries and “prompt cessation” of infringement—language that, in Europe, typically translates into DNS, IP, and sometimes URL-level blocking orders. Ukraine is an EU candidate country and is aligning its laws with EU directives; the submission also notes involvement from the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, a reminder that IP policy is often written with foreign trade optics in mind.

This would not be Ukraine’s first attempt. TorrentFreak notes a 2015 draft bill that included explicit “restriction of access” provisions and heavy fines, which never passed. The difference now is institutional momentum: EU harmonization plus wartime centralization.

And the infrastructure is already there. Ukraine participates in WIPO ALERT, an ad-blocklist program meant to starve pirate sites of advertising revenue. In 2025, the Ukrainian IP office (UANIPIO) reportedly received 17 rightsholder applications and added 15 sites to the national list shared with WIPO.

More consequentially, Ukraine’s 2023 Media Law has been used to block hundreds of websites—TorrentFreak cites reports of more than 570 domains blocked by Ukrainian ISPs—targeting pirate services and “pro-Russian” streaming sites under an “aggressor state” media-services framework. That is not copyright enforcement; it is a censorship mechanism built on emergency logic.

You don’t need to romanticize piracy to see the problem. Site blocking is a blunt technical instrument with well-known failure modes: overblocking shared infrastructure, easy circumvention via VPNs and alternative resolvers, and—most predictably—mission creep. Once a country normalizes network-level blocking for one category of “bad sites,” the category expands, the process becomes faster, and judicial safeguards become optional paperwork.

Ukraine’s war makes the temptation understandable. It also makes the risk obvious: temporary controls have a habit of becoming permanent defaults, especially when the tooling is already deployed and the political cost of keeping it is near zero.