Binance Used Undisclosed Email to Hand Russia Donor Data

This isn’t the first time a Russian request like this has reached Binance. In 2022, Reuters reported that Gleb Kostarev, then the exchange’s Eastern Europe and Russia chief, met with officials from Rosfinmonitoring, the financial-intelligence unit tied to Russia’s FSB, who wanted help identifying bitcoin donors to Alexei Navalny’s network. Binance denied at the time that it had handed over any of that data. Three years later, asked to do something similar for a different donor, it did.

Binance announced its full exit from the Russian market in September 2023, selling its local business to a new entity, CommEX. That announcement fell in the middle of the period when investigators say Belenkiy was making his donations. The data handover that helped charge him came roughly two years after Binance said it had left.

Binance does not create or enforce laws, determine charges, or decide how governments use information in legal proceedings. We cooperate with legal information requests from law enforcement worldwide, subject to applicable legal, regulatory and privacy requirements.

The company did not answer whether the transfer complied with EU data protection law, a question that matters because Belenkiy held Bulgarian residency. Mike Bystrov, a consultant at Stellar Consulting, argues that the EU doesn’t recognize Russia as a country with adequate data protection, which would make a transfer like this one a problem if Belenkiy was registered on Binance as an EU resident. That reading hasn’t been tested by any regulator or court.

Reuters says dozens of Russians have faced prosecution over crypto donations to Ukraine, without saying how many of those cases involved exchange-supplied data. Separately, a nuclear researcher in Sarov was sentenced to 18 years for a donation of about $13, a resident of Yakutia received seven years, and a man in Tula Oblast was arrested after Russia’s FSB used blockchain-analysis tools built by Rosfinmonitoring to trace donation channels. None of those cases has been shown to involve Binance.

Binance is already facing separate scrutiny in Washington. Senator Richard Blumenthal opened an inquiry in February into unrelated reporting that the exchange allowed $1.7 billion in transactions tied to Iran-linked entities and Russia’s sanctioned shipping fleet. Three days before the Belenkiy documents surfaced, Binance told users it would halt transactions with more than a dozen other crypto platforms under new EU sanctions targeting Russia. Its guidelines page, as of this writing, still doesn’t mention the inbox that answered Moscow’s request for Yuri Belenkiy.