Russia’s finance ministry may add fees, limits, and transfer controls for USDT, USDC, BNB, and other “unfriendly” crypto in June

Russia’s finance ministry is preparing a special regime for the coins it has flagged as the riskiest, with measures that could range from technical restrictions to commissions and recommendations. For high-risk PSPs and brokers, the useful part is obvious: the discussion is not about crypto in the abstract, but about how to handle assets that can be frozen, delayed, or blocked by issuers and intermediaries.

1. The proposed rules would target USDT, USDC, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB, with regulation possibly introduced as early as June. The menu under discussion includes technical protection measures, fees, and recommendations, and one option on the table was a full ban on some coins.
2. The main concern is stablecoins. Their issuers can freeze funds and restrict access to specific addresses, which makes them a cleaner control point than decentralized assets. That is why USDT and USDC are singled out: they are widely used by Russian users, but they also sit inside legal and technical systems that can be used to block transfers.
3. Tether is already blocking a meaningful amount of Russia-linked funds. According to the source, it freezes almost half a billion dollars of Russian assets per year, and on average $30–40 million a month connected to Russia in various jurisdictions and wallets. The article also says that part of Russia’s funds “lives” in Western legal systems, which means those assets can be frozen relatively easily.
4. For Russian foreign trade, USDT remains the main working tool. The source says Russian cross-border trade uses USDT in 90% of transactions for sanctions circumvention, and that there is no normal replacement for USDT in the market yet. In practice, that means companies and individuals keep using it despite the operational risk.
5. The proposed controls would not stop at coin selection. They may include mandatory investor testing, limits on transaction size, temporary delays for withdrawals, and special rules for sending crypto to external wallets. Additional fees could range from 0.5–2% of the transaction amount, and for dollar stablecoins could reach 3%. Those fees would be charged at the broker and exchange level, i.e. where the asset is actually sold.

The source also notes that Binance’s BNB and ByBit’s token have both been involved in freezing assets of Russian clients. For PSPs, exchanges, and brokers dealing with high-risk flows, the practical takeaway is straightforward: issuer-level controls are already part of the risk model, and the state is now moving to layer its own controls on top of them.