As part of the 20th package of sanctions, new rules for the crypto market have come into effect in the EU: starting from May 24, European licensed companies are prohibited from working with crypto services related to Russia or Belarus.

This was reported to dev.ua in a comment by the Presidential Commissioner for Sanctions Policy of Ukraine, Vladyslav Vlasyuk.

«It’s not about individual exchanges, but about the very principle of operation: if a service has Russian or Belarusian registration or infrastructure connection, transactions with it for European players are blocked,» he explained.

According to Vlasyuk, the RUBx stablecoin and the digital ruble, which has not even been launched into mass circulation, were separately restricted.

«This is a signal that the EU is beginning to restrict not only market participants, but also the financial instruments themselves that the Kremlin can use,» concluded the Ukrainian President’s representative for sanctions policy.

In his opinion, this step indicates increased control over transactions and a higher risk of payment refusals in the event of connections to Russian infrastructure.

«For the Russian economy, this is another narrowing of access to external payments and financial channels. In the long term, this complicates the import of technologies and components, in particular those used in the military-industrial sector, where crypto payments played a supporting role,» Vladyslav Vlasyuk emphasized.

At the same time, the day before it became known that the United Kingdom has imposed sanctions against 18 cryptocurrency platforms, banks and financial networks that the Russian Federation used to circumvent sanctions. In particular, the new British sanctions concern the international payment system A7.

As dev.ua previously reported, the Russia-linked, sanctioned crypto exchange Grinex has stopped operating after a $15 million hacker attack allegedly carried out by «Western intelligence services.»