The ruling handed down today by the Arbitration Tribunal of The Hague awarding $50 billion in damages to Yukos shareholders for the expropriation of company represents one of the most important judicial events in recent history.

The tribunal’s ruling not only represents one of the largest ever against a sovereign, but the decision also cuts to the core of the corrupt structure of the current administration in the Kremlin, where the instruments of state power were manipulated as part of a “devious and calculated expropriation,” featuring not only a merciless persecution of the shareholders but also a rigged auction to place the prized assets of Russia’s most successful company in the hands of Rosneft.

At the very center of President Vladimir Putin’s state the Tribunal has found a terrible criminal act upon which much of the state’s power and influence was corruptly built.  This ruling has the potential to serve as precedent for many other cases of abuses of state power by Russia (from unlawful arrests to corporate raids to shutting off gas supply, etc.). I would say that the ruling resembles the beginning of the end of Russian impunity.