"Working with crypto will become more difficult," says Nikolai Zagvozdkin, product development director at RBC. That may be an understatement. On July 23, EU member states formally agreed to their 21st sanctions package against Russia, and for the first time the bloc is targeting crypto platforms sitting outside European borders. The package hits 11 unnamed exchanges, 94 Russian banks and the Moscow Exchange all at once. Bitcoin stays legal. Getting to it, though, just got considerably harder.
The EU's frustration with Russian crypto is well documented at this point. Garantex was sanctioned by the US in 2022, then by the EU in early 2025. Police seized its website in March of that year and froze more than $26 million. Within days the same team relaunched under a new name, Grinex, with nearly identical infrastructure. That pattern is exactly why Brussels banned Russia's entire crypto sector in May 2025. The scale of the problem is staggering: analytics firm Elliptic found that a single ruble-linked token called A7A5 moved over $100 billion in one year. So the logic shifted again. If shutting down one exchange only produces a clone, ban the whole sector. If Russians then migrate to platforms in third countries, go after those too.
Kaja Kallas, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, put it plainly in a post on X: the 21st package targets Moscow's financial system, its military-industrial complex and its energy revenues, the mechanisms that keep the war economy running. The new geographic reach of the crypto measures is the real novelty here. The EU can now sanction crypto service providers in countries outside Europe, which is precisely where Russian users have been routing activity since earlier rounds tightened the screws. Nadezhda Surova of Russia's Federation Council Digital Economy Council noted that the practical impact depends heavily on how broadly the EU chooses to define "crypto operators," a definition that Brussels has not yet made explicit.
For ordinary Russian holders, the immediate picture is mixed. Coins sitting in a self-custody wallet are untouched. The choke point is access to the broader market. Exchanges operating under the EU's MiCA framework run source-of-funds checks and block accounts connected to sanctioned entities. Some users have already had funds frozen after deposits were traced back to A7A5 activity. Fees are climbing. Transfers are slowing. Earlier rounds left portions of Russian crypto holdings effectively stranded, and the 11 newly targeted platforms are likely to produce the same result for another wave of users. The oil price cap, frozen at $44.10 per barrel for 12 months under the same package, adds a parallel squeeze to Russia's hard-currency revenues.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice.
