Thirty-eight new names went on to Britain’s Russia sanctions list on Thursday. Among the oil companies and tankers were three crypto exchanges, two payment platforms and one individual, Decrypt reported.
The best known is Cryptomus. The Foreign Office designated Xeltox Enterprises, a company registered in Vancouver, as its owner, and for activity it said had continued through a second brand, Heleket.
The others are in Kyrgyzstan. TokenSpot, an exchange, and Tsunami Payments share an office tower in Bishkek. Processing KG, which runs the payment service VexPay, was listed along with its director, Ulan Bukabaev. According to the sanctions notice, its parent is Kyrgyzstan’s finance ministry.
The government said two of the targets processed transactions for A7, the Kremlin-backed network behind the rouble-pegged stablecoin A7A5. It says A7 claimed to have moved more than $90 billion last year.
Assets the firms hold in Britain are frozen. Some also face internet services sanctions, which oblige app stores, internet providers and social media platforms to take reasonable steps to keep British users away from them.
This is the pattern now. Washington labelled A7 a transnational criminal organisation last week, and Britain sanctioned the exchange HTX in May over services to the same network. Each round reaches further from Moscow, into Canadian shells and Central Asian processors.
The state-owned parent is the awkward detail. Sanctioning a payments firm that sits under another country’s finance ministry is a diplomatic act as much as a financial one.
What the notice does not give is how much money went through these firms, or which two worked with A7. The $90 billion is A7’s own boast, repeated by the government and not measured by it. And a freeze on British assets only bites if the firms had any.
