The exchange answered a Kremlin investigator with the passport scan, address and phone number of a customer who had sent $700 to Ukrainian military fundraisers. He has been in a Moscow jail awaiting trial for almost two years.
Binance disclosed a full identity file on one of its Russian users to a Kremlin investigation team, and the man is now in a Moscow jail awaiting trial for financing terrorism. The disclosed sum was $700.
Reuters reported on Monday that the exchange responded to two requests from Russia's Investigative Committee about Yuri Belenkiy, a 49-year-old IT specialist. What Binance sent back included his date of birth, home address, phone number, passport number, scans of his Russian passport and Bulgarian residency permit, and the full history of the transfers Russian prosecutors care about. Belenkiy had moved a little over $700 in crypto between January 2023 and March 2024 to fundraisers collecting for Ukrainian military units, including one linked to the Azov Brigade, a group Russia designates as terrorist.
He was arrested in September 2025. He has not been tried.
The correspondence went through case@binanceholdings.ru, an address Binance's own site had pointed Russian and Belarusian police at while it was still directly operating in the country. The exchange sold that business to CommEX in September 2023, telling users the market did not fit its compliance strategy and confirming there would be no revenue share or repurchase option. Investigators kept using the same channel afterwards and, according to the documents obtained by The First Department (a group that supports defendants in Russian political cases), kept receiving answers.
Binance's current law-enforcement guidelines say the exchange requires a valid court order, police order or warrant before releasing user data in a criminal case. The company told Reuters it cooperates with lawful requests, subject to legal, privacy and regulatory rules. It declined to say whether that framework applied to Belenkiy's file, or whether the response to a Russian investigator might have breached European data protection law.
This is where the compliance story frays. Russia has been under an unusually broad Western sanctions regime for more than three years. The EU's twentieth sanctions package this May extended those measures to the entire Russian crypto sector, including decentralised platforms. Binance is registered in multiple EU jurisdictions and processes data on European servers. Treating Russia's Investigative Committee like a normal counterparty and mailing out passport scans invites regulatory questions that the exchange's short statement does not begin to answer.
Nor does it address the fact that Belenkiy is not a criminal suspect in any meaningful international sense. Donating to Ukrainian military charities is legal in every jurisdiction Binance operates in that matters. Russia's characterisation of Azov-affiliated fundraisers as terrorist entities is a domestic legal position not shared by Ukraine, the EU or the US, all of which fund the same military. Binance's cooperation, in effect, meant applying Moscow's terrorism designations to its own customer.
The commercial argument for handing records to any government that asks is that the alternative is losing access to that market. Binance no longer has a Russian market to lose. The company announced its exit in September 2023, a decision framed at the time as a compliance upgrade after the $4.3 billion in US settlements and the guilty plea of founder Changpeng Zhao. The residual mailbox was supposed to close old files, not open new ones two years after the sale.
Belenkiy's family passed the documents to The First Department, which has spent the past four years defending Russians charged with speech, protest and donation crimes. The group is now the primary paper trail of what a compliant exchange looks like when the government asking is authoritarian. The record it has assembled is not flattering.
Users who read Binance's marketing carefully have long known that the exchange holds real KYC files. That is what regulators demanded and what the company built. Belenkiy's case is the first published example of that file being handed to a jurisdiction where a $700 donation to a foreign army is a life-sentence risk. Bulgarian residency and a European passport did not shield him from a Moscow prosecutor with an email address.
CoinDesk reported on Monday that Binance had not responded to its own inquiry. Reuters received the same statement about lawful cooperation. Neither publication got an answer on whether the exchange still monitors case@binanceholdings.ru, or whether anyone else is currently sitting in a Russian jail because of what it contained.
