Binance has long joined the sanctions against the Russian Federation. It recently announced the blocking of several accounts that belonged to relatives of prominent Kremlin politicians, notably the daughters of Sergei Lavrov and Dmitry Peskov. The world community believes that Binance will not stop there and will continue to find an opportunity to influence the government elite of the aggressor country.
Background
The whole world is shocked by the cruelty of Russia in the war with Ukraine; therefore, more and more organizations are joining the sanctions initiated by the government of the United States, EU countries, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, and several other states.
Various restrictions apply to the military and financial sectors of the Russian Federation. It was done to reduce the ability of the aggressor country to continue hostilities and sponsor terrorism.
For a while, the crypto world remained aloof from all these events, but gradually, many exchanges began to impose restrictions on users from Russia, and Binance was no exception.
After the introduction of the first crypto sanctions against Russia, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky officially thanked all those who are not indifferent and signed a decree that allows:
- Crypto exchanges operate legally in the country;
- Banks to open cryptocurrency accounts;
- Solve various financial disputes in the legal field and so on.
It is assumed that such interaction will benefit both the crypto world and the Ukrainian economy. In addition, the government of Ukraine has created a collection of NFTs depicting military actions, all the money from which went to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Binance’s relationship with sanctions
For the first few days, the leadership of Binance did not react in any way to the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine. It is worth noting that on February 24 (the day the hostilities began), the cost of most cryptocurrencies fell sharply.
In early March, Binance and several other crypto exchanges announced that they would not impose sanctions against Russia, as they considered it a violation of the basic principles of cryptocurrencies.
Recall that cryptocurrencies were created as a decentralized payment system that can easily bypass banking and government regulation. For a long time, this was used to circumvent the sanctions that were imposed on the Russian Federation after the annexation of Crimea and aggression against Ukraine in the Donbas.
However, as the hostilities took place and the whole world watched all the atrocities of Russia in Ukraine, many crypto companies began to change their attitude towards what was happening. So, on March 20, Binance joined the sanctions against several Russian banks and stopped P2P transactions for them. The restrictions affected such large banks as:
- Sberbank;
- Gazprombank;
- Alfa-Bank;
- Bank Otkritie;
- VTB and others.
The system automatically disabled all payments. In addition, even earlier, it stopped accepting Visa and MasterCard bank cards issued in Russia.
The next step in terms of sanctions came around mid-April when Binance began to limit the account capabilities of users from Russia with more than 10 thousand Euros in their accounts.
The last step is to block accounts belonging to Kremlin politicians’ relatives. It is now known that such restrictions have affected:
- Polina Kovaleva, stepdaughter of Sergei Lavrov,
- Elizaveta Peskova, daughter of Dmitry Peskov;
- Kirill Malofeev, son of Konstantin Malofeev.
These individuals have previously been sanctioned by the US and/or the UK. Binance has discovered that it will continue to identify users from the sanctions list and block their crypto accounts. It is done to prevent sanctions circumvention through crypto exchanges or wallets.