Binance’s published rules for handling requests from Russian and Belarusian law enforcement make no mention of case@binanceholdings.ru, the email address the exchange used in 2025 to send Russian investigators the identity and full transaction history of Yuri Belenkiy, a 49-year-old IT specialist now charged with financing terrorism over crypto donations to Ukraine.
The exchange’s guidelines, posted on its own Russian-language support page, describe a formal process built around court orders, called the Law Enforcement Request System, with a promised three-business-day review. That page says nothing about a direct email inbox. Yet it was that inbox, according to case documents obtained by The First Department, a legal-aid group founded by exiled Russian lawyer Ivan Pavlov to represent people facing treason and espionage cases, that Russia’s Investigative Committee used to request Belenkiy’s account details. Binance used the same inbox to send them.
What Binance sent went well beyond a name. The file included Belenkiy’s birth date, address, phone number, and passport information, copies of his Russian passport and Bulgarian residency permit, his Binance account balances, internal transfers, deposit and withdrawal history, and a login history covering his devices, browsers, and locations.
The Case Behind the File
Belenkiy has held Bulgarian residency since 2015. Investigators say that between January 2023 and March 2024 he sent crypto worth just over 60,000 rubles, around $700, to a wallet the journalist Arkady Babchenko had published for Ukrainian military and medical aid. Babchenko is listed in Russia as a foreign agent and named on its registry of extremists and terrorists. Belenkiy was detained at Sheremetyevo airport in September 2025 and formally charged on October 13 under Russia’s terrorism-financing statute, Article 205.1, by a Moscow court that ordered him held pending trial. The First Department’s own summary of the case file goes further, describing a later charge of state treason, a detail that doesn’t appear in the Moscow court’s public record.
When Belenkiy’s lawyer asked Binance about the case, the exchange gave a different answer than the one already sitting in its own file. Its support channel told the lawyer it does not disclose third-party information without legal grounds and does not hand over user data without a court order. The file it had already sent investigators shows it had done exactly that.
A Pattern That Predates This Case
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.
Related: FSB Shuts Down Nine Illegal Moscow Crypto Exchanges Linked to Ukrainian Call-Center Fraud
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.
Asked about the case, Binance said:
“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 Legal Question Binance Won’t Answer
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.
Other Prosecutions, and Wider Scrutiny
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.
Related: Russia’s New Crypto Law Leaves 69% of Russians Unconvinced
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.
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