20/08/2026
Binance handed FSB data on an EU resident. Now he faces life in prison for a $1,680 crypto donation
In September 2025, Yuri Belensky - an IT specialist who had been living in Bulgaria since 2015 - was detained at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. He was transiting through Russia. That transit turned into a nightmare.
The charges: financing terrorism and state treason. The alleged crime: cryptocurrency donations totalling around $1,680 USDT sent to Ukraine.
What made the prosecution possible: Binance handed Russian investigators a full data package - KYC documents, passport scans, transaction history, login records with geolocation, and device fingerprints. At the time of the request, Belensky was classified as an EU resident.
No GDPR. No legal assistance treaty. Just a data response to Russian law enforcement.
This isn't the first signal. Back in 2022, Reuters reported that Binance shared user data with Russian financial monitoring agencies. Binance denied it. A Russian lawmaker described "cabinets filled with documents" of FSB and Interior Ministry requests to foreign crypto exchanges.
The architecture of crypto surveillance is not hypothetical. It's operational.
Follow the full story with the comments of DRC Law partner Саркис Дарбинян
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