Yuri Belenkiy, a 49-year-old IT specialist and former director at DiHouse, was sentenced Monday by a Russian military court to 13 years — three in prison followed by 10 in a strict-regime penal colony — for making cryptocurrency donations to Ukrainian military fundraising campaigns. The court found he transferred roughly 120,000 roubles ($1,500) across 15 transactions between August 2022 and March 2024. His crime, per Russia's legal framework: financing "terrorism," specifically the Azov battalion. The conviction rests on a single fulcrum: Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, handed Belenkiy's full transaction history to Russian law enforcement in response to a formal request. Law enforcement documents reviewed by Reuters confirm the data was instrumental. "The response from Binance serves as key evidence in the criminal case against Belenkiy," said Yevgeny Smirnov, a lawyer with First Department, a rights group that tracks politically motivated prosecutions in Russia. Binance's position is legally minimalist and morally vacant. The exchange told Reuters it "does not make or enforce the laws of any jurisdiction, determine charges, or decide how any government uses information in legal proceedings." It declined to comment on individual cases. This from a company that formally exited the Russian market in 2023, ostensibly in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions regime that followed. The defence team argued in court that Binance has not cooperated with Russia since 2022 — a claim the prosecution's evidence directly contradicts. The legal exposure cuts both ways. Crypto regulation lawyer Mike Bystrov told Reuters that Binance was under no obligation to provide the data. Worse, given Belenkiy's Bulgarian residency, EU data protection law (GDPR) may have actively prohibited the transfer. Belenkiy was detained in September 2024 when he flew to Moscow for a visit — a detail that underscores the trap: Russian authorities can prosecute citizens who donated from abroad if they ever set foot in the country again. The Belenkiy case is not an outlier. First Department reported that roughly 10 percent of all treason and espionage charges brought in Russia in 2025 are linked to donations to Ukrainian organisations. Authorities are tracking both cryptocurrency and conventional bank transfers, and continue opening cases over donations made as far back as 2022. The legal dragnet is retroactive, comprehensive, and growing. The structural problem is a corporate intermediary that controls pseudonymous transaction data and responds to state requests without meaningful resistance. Binance's "neutrality" framing — we just comply with legal requests — collapses when the requesting state criminalises humanitarian donations and sentences people to a decade in penal colonies. The exchange has positioned itself as infrastructure that any regime can weaponise, regardless of where the company is nominally headquartered or which markets it claims to have exited. Belenkiy's defence will appeal. He was fined an additional 500,000 roubles ($6,300). He remains on Russia's financial monitoring agency's list of "terrorists and extremists" — a designation that, like the data Binance provided, is unlikely to be reversed.
