PlayCity issues 250 licences and blocks 4,100 illegal gambling sites in its first year regulating Ukraine

Ukraine’s gambling regulator PlayCity has published its first annual report since replacing KRAIL, and the numbers show a market that is being pushed toward digital licensing, tighter enforcement, and more formal tax collection. For PSPs and acquiring partners, the useful bit is not the rhetoric: it is the combination of faster licence issuance, transaction monitoring, and heavy action against unlicensed operators.

1. PlayCity said it issued 250 licences in 2025–26 after moving licensing to the government’s Diia portal. The breakdown was 11 licences for gambling operators, three for lottery operators, and 213 for gaming equipment suppliers, which tells you where the regulator’s workload actually sits.
2. Licence fees brought in more than UAH569m (€11m) for the state budget. Lottery licensing alone generated UAH72m after an application window opened in December, following more than a decade in which lottery operators’ activities were unregulated.
3. The report says licensed lottery operators paid more than UAH74m in tax receipts in the first quarter of 2026, the first quarter with regulated lottery operations. Overall, gambling organisers contributed an estimated UAH14bn in taxes, with another UAH2bn collected in personal income tax linked to the sector.
4. On enforcement, PlayCity imposed fines exceeding UAH988m for legal violations and around UAH80m for breaches of advertising rules. It also launched an online complaints platform in May to speed up public reporting of illegal gambling ads, and says sites can now be taken down within a single day.
5. The agency says it has blocked more than 4,100 illegal gambling websites and over 700 social media accounts tied to unlawful promotions. At the same time, Ukraine’s State Online Gambling Monitoring system, DSOM, has started tracking bets, payouts, and returns; 11 operators are already connected.

PlayCity head Gennedy Novikov framed DSOM as “creating infrastructure that the state actually did not have” and as a data-driven model meant to spot risks before they turn into a crisis. The report also says PlayCity processed more than 3,000 requests for gambling restrictions, created a register of people with gaming addiction, introduced financial and time limits, and coordinated measures with the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Digital Affairs to prevent military personnel from gambling.