Cryptocurrencies are helping Ukrainian refugees quickly move money as they flee the Russian invasion, but they may also be used to help Russians evade sanctions.
that he had managed to escape the fighting in Ukraine thanks to bitcoin.
He woke on 24 February to news of the invasion and found cash machine payouts limited by emergency laws, and huge queues to withdraw money. International bank transfers had also been banned. He managed to transfer all his available money into bitcoin and escape with his girlfriend over the border to Poland. He would otherwise have been conscripted into the army, he says. “Bitcoin saved my life.
Russians have also been converting their money to bitcoin as the value of the rouble plummets after global sanctions strangled Russia’s economy. Demand for bitcoin has been so high that it has been. There are simply more people looking to buy than there are people trying to sell who can, or will, accept Russian roubles.
There are fears that Russia’s wealthy elite and those connected to Putin will use similar tactics to remove their money from the country to circumvent sanctions. Butat the University of Notre Dame in Indiana says that any Russian oligarch using a Swiss bank – long a favourite storage option because of the country’s strict banking privacy laws – and hoping to cash in millions of dollars worth of bitcoin would be likely to appear on the radar of numerous watchful Western governments.
He believes that while countries such as North Korea have been able to establish complex global networks to work around sanctions so they can move funds and goods using bitcoin, Russia has had no time to prepare. “Every bank is very, very suspicious of reasonably large transfers from anybody who’s trying to convert into euros or dollars who hasn’t been a prior customer,” he says.
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