Binance Left Russia In 2023: Why Is Moscow Still Getting User Data?

What Happened

Binance said it left Russia in 2023. Two years later, Russian investigators asked the exchange for a customer’s records. They got them. Reuters reportedly reviewed the law enforcement documents showing those files became evidence in a terrorism financing case.

The contradiction is simpler than it looks. Leaving a market ends revenue in a country. It does not delete the files an exchange already holds.

The announcement was precise about money. Binance kept no revenue share. It kept no option to buy the business back. The exchange had spent the previous weeks weighing a Russian withdrawal under regulatory pressure.

The customer was Yuri Belenkiy, a Russian IT specialist detained in September 2025. Investigators accuse him of sending just over $700 to Ukrainian military fundraisers. Moscow calls that terrorism financing.

Reuters reported that two replies reached investigators from [email protected]. Binance’s own website had listed that address for Russian and Belarusian agencies.

Data only can go back to 4-1-2020, 1,094 total requests from Russia, 3 directly from FSB, 1 directly from Rosfin,” read an excerpt in the Binance announcement.

Market Context

It said nothing about data. That silence matters. Exchanges hold passport scans, addresses and full trading histories for years. Anti-money-laundering rules in the markets that license them demand it. Selling a subsidiary does not touch that archive.

Why It Matters

Mike Bystrov, founder of the law firm Stellar Consulting, reportedly told Reuters that Binance had no duty to answer. He said EU rules may have barred the disclosure. Binance disputes that reading.

Whether any of this reaches Belenkiy is unclear. He holds a Bulgarian residency permit. GDPR covers him only if Binance registered him as an EU customer, and Reuters could not confirm that.

Details

What Binance Actually Ended in 2023

Binance sold its Russian arm to CommEX on September 27, 2023. Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman said operating in Russia did not fit the company’s compliance strategy.

The Channel Was Never New

That pipeline is not new. Binance published the numbers itself in April 2022. It had logged 1,094 requests from Russian law enforcement since April 2020.

Three came from the Federal Security Service (FSB). One came from Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence agency.

For scale, Binance said eight months later that it had answered more than 47,445 law enforcement requests worldwide. Average turnaround was three days.

The company rejected the Reuters account in 2022 and denied sharing data on donors to Alexei Navalny. Its position has not moved since.

“Like other global financial institutions, we cooperate with lawful information requests from law enforcement globally, subject to applicable legal, privacy and regulatory requirements,” Reuters reported Monday, citing a Binance spokesperson.

Binance’s public request page now sends agencies to a portal run by Kodex. Only China gets a separate link. No Russian address appears there.

The Test Binance’s Own Rules Set

Binance publishes a bar for these cases. The company says it needs a valid court order, police order or warrant before it hands anything over.

European law sets a second bar. Article 48 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) covers demands from foreign authorities. The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) spelled out the standard in December 2024 guidelines.

Such a demand is enforceable only if an international agreement backs it. A mutual legal assistance treaty is the usual example.

Here the record goes quiet. The documents Reuters describes show a request, not a court order. They establish no treaty basis either. Binance reportedly declined to discuss the case.

The EDPB also said in 2022 that Russia holds no adequacy finding. Exporters who cannot close the resulting gaps are told to suspend transfers.