The European Union has imposed new sanctions against Kyrgyz banks and companies that help Russia launder money through cryptocurrency. President Sadyr Japarov calls the sanctions unjustified. However, there is evidence that Kyrgyz businesses are involved in these schemes, and that the individuals involved are linked to the FSB.
Sadyr Japarov. Photo: Presidential Press Service
The latest, 19th, EU sanctions package includes the Eurasian Savings Bank ( owned by Bakiyev’s associates) and Tolubai Bank in Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, sanctions were imposed on the Russian cryptocurrency A7A5, which is traded on the Kyrgyz crypto exchange Grinex. RBC, citing EU documents , reports that Grinex itself has also been sanctioned. It has already been under US and UK sanctions since August.
Residents of EU countries are prohibited from engaging in any transactions with these organizations or providing them with any services. All their assets in the EU (accounts, property) will be frozen.
On September 23, speaking at the UN General Assembly, Sadyr Japarov once again called sanctions against Kyrgyz companies an unjustified interference in the country’s internal affairs and pressure on its economy.
The president was likely referring to the August US and UK sanctions against Kapital Bank , Old Vector, and the Grinex crypto exchange . This exchange traded the world’s first ruble-denominated stablecoins, A5A7, in Bishkek. According to the US Treasury Department, the Russian military-backed Promsvyazbank used these coins to evade sanctions and transfer funds from Russia to countries around the world.
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to fiat currency, such as the dollar, euro, or yuan. This protects it from sharp fluctuations in exchange rates (stable means stable).
But A7A5 is more than a stablecoin. It’s the only cryptocurrency that has received the status of a digital financial asset in Russia. Its operator is accredited by the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and bears legal obligations to the asset owner. No one is responsible for regular cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin). It would seem that everything is transparent and clear. But then things get weird.
Illustration generated by Canva
A7A5 was developed by the Russian company A7, which is owned by fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor. A7A5 is operated by Tokeon, a company controlled by the Russian state-owned Promsvyazbank. However, for some reason, these stablecoins were issued by a Bishkek-based company, Old Vector . They were also traded in Bishkek, on the Grinex exchange, which is not accredited in Russia.
Since 2024, digital financial assets have been officially used in Russia to evade sanctions. As Kloop previously reported , billions of Russian dollars were laundered through A7A5 on Grinex , which was used to purchase sanctioned goods. Bishkek-based Kapital Bank was involved in the scheme . All of these legal entities have been sanctioned.
Sadyr Japarov complained back in the summer that the US and UK had imposed restrictions on Kyrgyz companies and banks without proving their involvement in evading sanctions against Russia. "They have been unable to produce a single instance of violation. And they won’t be able to, because there are no such instances and there never have been," he said .
However, a September investigation by Transparency International revealed that Grinex, which trades Ilan Shor’s A7A5 stablecoin in Bishkek, is a splinter of the largest ruble-denominated crypto exchange, Garantex.
In 2022, Garantex was sanctioned by the US for money laundering and involvement in drug trafficking , and since February 2025, it has been sanctioned by the EU. However, it didn’t die out, instead transforming into a decentralized network under the brands Grinex, Exved, and MKAN Coin. They offer the same services, use the same crypto wallet addresses, and rent offices in the same Moscow City district as Garantex. The idea that Grinex is a reincarnation of Garantex was discussed in the Russian cryptocurrency community back in the spring. The US Treasury Department also believes so. Analysts from Chainalysis , TRM Labs , The Record , and Coinpaper identify Garantex founder Sergei Mendeleev as the organizer and leader of the network, which includes Grinex .
Photo: TG Mendeleevshchina
"Comrade Major will be giving us a lecture."
Mendeleev himself claims he doesn’t know anyone at Grinex. He called Transparency International’s investigation "pathetic" but didn’t refute it, limiting himself to cursing the "soy faggot foreign agents."
The Russian propaganda jargon coming from an international crypto businessman is understandable: the US is offering a $6 million bounty on Mendeleev’s head, and it’s dangerous for him to leave Russia. All he can do is show loyalty to the regime whose hostage he has become.
On September 3, Sergei Mendeleev attended a meeting of the "Sostav" business club in Russia. According to its founder, the club brings together cryptocurrency miners, webcammers, carders, and representatives of other high-risk businesses.
Photo: Facebook
It was organized in April 2025 by Mikhail Zhukhovitsky . This man, who holds six citizenships, including Kyrgyzstan , calls himself a "cross-border payments consultant" and publicly admires successful scammers. After Putin’s attack on Ukraine, Zhukhovitsky began visiting Bishkek frequently. On Facebook, he advertised the availability of Kyrgyz women and Kyrgyz citizenship to wealthy Russians.
"Sergey Mendeleev, Garantex, is sitting at the back of the room," he describes one of his club’s events. "The US is also accusing him of a ton of things. And they’ve put a bounty on him, amounting to millions of dollars... There are also other people present who will never travel abroad again. They can’t. The scale of their actions is such that entering another country is guaranteed to result in detention. Under sanctions, they’ve done a lot for Russia. And they’ve automatically become enemies there."
On the left is Sergey Mendeleev, co-founder of the Garantex crypto exchange. On the right is Alexander Vinnik, founder of the BTC-e crypto exchange. Photo: Facebook
At the same time, Zhukhovitsky openly makes it clear that the Russian crypto community is connected to the intelligence services.
"Comrade Major, that’s the rank, will be giving a lecture at our place this Saturday," he boasts . "The Office*. It’s not the only structure in the club. The Jews were the first to join. Then two Russian structures joined: the FSB and the Foreign Ministry**. [...] The presence of these structures is only a plus. Where else can you ask them a question and get a competent answer? Nowhere. The fact that these structures have come to us openly is wonderful. There’s nothing to hide [...] At a certain level, a fusion of power and business is taking place. It’s impossible without it. There are many large, systemic*** members in ‘Sostav’ who control the CIS crypto market, with all the licenses."
*In Russia this is what they call the FSB.
** This probably refers to the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). ***Significant for the state.
The FSB’s Crypto Empire: Deals, Kidnappings, and Mysterious Deaths
Russia ranks second in the world in terms of cryptocurrency mining volume. According to CASE, the commissions on the shadow money transfer market from and to Russia alone amount to $10-30 billion annually. Such sums could not be overlooked by the security services, and the Russian crypto market’s connection to them is abundantly confirmed. Alexander Vinnik , whose photo with Mendeleev was proudly posted by Zhukhovitsky, is one of the founders of BTC-e, the formerly most popular Russian-language crypto exchange. In 2017, he was arrested in Greece at the request of the US for money laundering. And soon after, according to Andrey Zakharov, author of the book "Crypto," FSB officers kidnapped Vinnik’s business partner, Alexey Bilyuchenko, in Moscow. Anton Nemkin of the FSB’s 1st Service forced him to give up access to wallets containing $450 million worth of cryptocurrency. According to Zakharov, Nemkin acted in the interests of oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who is also associated with the FSB.
Nemkin’s assistant denied any connection to Bilyuchenko or his work. However, at the 2018 Eastern Economic Forum, Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev introduced Anton Nemkin as the developer of the Vladex crypto exchange, created at the behest of the Russian president. In 2021, Nemkin became a State Duma deputy . Prior to this, he declared an annual income of 569 million rubles.
Anton Nemkin. Photo: Instagram
Meanwhile, Vinnik was transferred from Greece to a French prison to be extradited to the United States. But he proved such an important figure for the Kremlin that Russian Ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova asked the French Interior Minister for his release. Vinnik was ultimately extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty. In February 2025, Moscow exchanged him for American Mark Vogel, convicted in Russia of drug smuggling. Vinnik had also been wanted in Russia since 2018. As soon as he returned home, the Russian Interior Ministry announced that it had no charges against him.
Roman Seleznev , the son of State Duma deputy Valery Seleznev, a notorious carder nicknamed "Psycho," is also linked to the security services . While in Russia, he stole and sold bank card information from Americans. In 2009, US investigators asked their Russian counterparts to detain him. But instead, the FSB, according to the Americans, alerted Seleznev to the FSB’s search, and he went into hiding.
Roman Seleznev. Still from Channel 1’s broadcast.
In 2014, Seleznev was finally detained in the Maldives and extradited to the United States, where he received a 27-year prison sentence. In 2024, Seleznev and a group of Russian spies who had failed in the US were exchanged for Americans arrested in Russia. President Putin personally met them at the airport. Seleznev is currently creating a new cryptocurrency exchange in Russia. His father, along with Vladimir Putin’s close friend, Yuri Kovalchuk, owns a stake in Russia’s largest mining company, BitRiver.
The notorious "poisoner," MP Andrei Lugovoi, also has a stake in BitRiver . In 2007, British prosecutors charged him with the murder of his former FSB colleague, Alexander Litvinenko, who lived in London and helped MI6 uncover Russian mafia networks in Europe. A lawyer for the Litvinenko family claimed that Lugovoi slipped radioactive polonium into Litvinenko’s tea on Putin’s personal orders. Investigators confirmed this.
Now Lugovoy is a member of the State Duma and is also lobbying for legislation on cryptocurrency mining. His wife, Ksenia, appears in music videos under the pseudonym KAYA and is involved in the cryptocurrency business. According to the Dossier Center, Ksenia Lugovoy co-owned a mining farm in Irkutsk and a crypto exchange on the 65th floor of the Federation Tower in Moscow City. There, the Lugovoy family "earns a 5-8% commission on each bag of dirty cash."
Andrey Lugovoy and Ksenia Lugovaya (KAYA). Photo: X
But the story of Sergei Mendeleev is even more illustrative.
He registered the Garantex exchange in 2019 in Estonia . However, its main office opened in Moscow City, where strange events began almost immediately. Security forces began frequenting the exchange , throwing everyone face down on the floor. In the fall of 2020, they searched the Moscow apartment of Garantex co-founder Stanislav Drugalev. According to Kartoteka, they demanded that he hand over the business. ICIJ reports that Drugalev agreed to "cooperate" but later left for Dubai. There, in February 2021, his car fell off a bridge. Drugalev’s wife says he was a very cautious person and calls his death criminal. According to Drugalev’s father, three days after his death, the co-owners of Garantex quietly rewrote the charter to prevent Drugalev’s share in the business, which the security forces were laying claim to, from going to his heirs. A month later, Mendeleev sold his stake in Garantex to former tax official Irina Chernyavskaya. After this, the security forces’ "masked show" at the exchange’s office ceased, according to Do Sie. According to the US Department of Justice, $96 billion passed through Garantex from 2019 to 2022.
Drugalev is not the only suspicious death among Mendeleev’s associates. On August 31, 2025, Garantex administrator Alexey Beshchekov (Beschokov), arrested in March at the request of the United States, died in an Indian prison . The Telegram channel "VChK-OGPU" linked his death to his agreement to extradition to the United States.
Mendeleev refuses to discuss the details of these stories . He insists he has no security "protection," and attributes the searches at the stock exchange to "client problems." Meanwhile, the Dossier Center has discovered that Irina Chernyavskaya, who bought Mendeleev’s stake after the mysterious death of his friend, is the partner of businessman Pavel Karavatsky. ICIJ has found connections between Karavatsky and the Kremlin and the criminal underworld. Karavatsky has long worked with Oleg Feoktistov, a well-known retired FSB general and former head of Rosneft’s security service.
Oleg Feoktistov. Photo: Mediazona
According to Dossier, Feoktistov is associated with a crypto exchange on the 14th floor of the Federation Tower in Moscow City. ICIJ clarifies that the building is home to a Fintech exchange owned by Karavatsky and Alexander Mira Serda, Mendeleev’s former partner at Garantex. According to ICIJ, the Fintech legal entity uses the phone numbers and email address of state-owned Rosneft. This state-owned company is managed by Vladimir Putin’s old friend, oligarch Igor Sechin. Both Sechin and Sechin are KGB alumni.
All this allows us to take a fresh look at the Bishkek-registered Grinex crypto exchange and Ilan Shor, who helped move billions of dollars through Grinex. He works with Russian state-owned banks and finances pro-Russian movements in Moldova. According to the Washington Post , Shor also has close ties to the FSB. Coincidentally, Shor’s office is also located in Moscow City.
"Boiled alive in boiling water"
Kyrgyzstan’s cryptocurrency market is also on the rise: it has grown 100-fold since 2022. The Ministry of Economy has counted 169 exchangers, 13 cryptocurrency exchanges, and 11 mining companies in the country. Their combined turnover from January to July 2025 exceeded 1 trillion soms. And all this is also attracting the attention of law enforcement.
On January 9, 2025, Kaktus Media reported on the theft of nearly $1 million in USDT cryptocurrency. The owners of the Kyrgyz crypto exchange Four Dragons claimed the crypto was stolen from their hot wallet during a major transaction and transferred through the Ukrainian-Lithuanian crypto exchange WhiteBIT. The suspects, Russian citizens—a former company employee and his accomplice—were reportedly detained by Kyrgyz security forces.
Kaktus did not name the detainees, but back in May 2024, the cryptocurrency magazine Forklog reported that one of them was named Marat Zaripov . And in September 2025, in a media newsletter, a Four Dragons representative released the identity of Zaripov’s detained accomplice: 19-year-old Alena Dmitrieva.
A year later, Four Dragons published the numbers of two criminal cases opened by the Kyrgyz Ministry of Internal Affairs on this matter in 2024: cases No. 03-050-2024-000505 and No. 03-050-2024-000537. They clarified that they were opened under Articles 205, Part 4 (Theft on an especially large scale), 222, Part 3 (Legalization and laundering of criminal proceeds on a large scale), and 262 (Creation of a criminal community and participation therein) of the Criminal Code of Kyrgyzstan.
The company later published another case number, No. 03-050-2024-000109A, "concerning the creation of an organized criminal group, hacking an exchange, and theft of digital assets." According to Four Dragons, this case involves "possible laundering schemes for up to $2.7 billion" and involves two crypto exchanges: Ukrainian WhiteBIT and Russian Garantex .
Marat Zaripov in the courtroom. Photo: Forklog
On March 28, 2025, Vesti.kg, citing a lawyer, reported that Zaripov was brutally beaten in a Bishkek pretrial detention center. He was brought to court with bruises on his face and head; he could barely move, and an ambulance was called. Representatives of Four Dragons also confirmed the beating . They stated that Zaripov’s life was in danger and demanded his transfer to the State Committee for National Security (GKNB) pretrial detention center.
Warning! Below is a description of the brutal murder and a photo of the body of Marat Zaripov.
A month later, the State Penitentiary Service press service reported the death of a prisoner at Pretrial Detention Center No. 1, identified only by his initials Z.M., from "liver cirrhosis progressing to liver cancer and portal hypertension syndrome" on March 28, 2025.
A month later, Four Dragons reported that on the night of March 27, Marat Zaripov was "brutally tortured and murdered" in Bishkek’s Pretrial Detention Center No. 1. "After two weeks of torture, he was literally boiled alive in boiling water, his oxygen was cut off, and he was beaten so severely that it could later be attributed to cirrhosis. This is confirmed by photographs, a death certificate, and accounts from fellow inmates," the company’s representatives claim.
"Marat was ‘put away’ in a pretrial detention center so that no one would know where the money went and how the dirty schemes worked," they write, citing Zaripov’s partner.
Four Dragons does not specify the specific schemes . However, in a press release dated September 17 , the company cited a preliminary analysis commissioned by Goran Safar, former Chainalisys regional manager for the CIS. He estimates that the channels through which $841,000 was stolen from Four Dragons accounted for $11.7 billion in laundered funds. In its media release, Four Dragons referred to these funds as "dirty, military, Russian dollars."
Now, according to Four Dragons representatives, the money laundering cases have been effectively hushed up, and the key defendants have been removed from the wanted list for accepting millions in bribes from WhiteBIT. The decision to close all cases, they claim, was made at the level of Ulan Niyazbekov, head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic. Four Dragons claims that these matters were handled by Ruslan Sharshembiev, Head of the Department for Detecting IT Crimes at the Main Directorate of Criminal Investigation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic, and Izat Dogdurbekov, Investigator for Particularly Important Cases at the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic. The company cites testimony from victim Dmitry Vasyukovich, whom Sharshembiev and Dogdurbekov allegedly persuaded to reconcile with WhiteBIT, assuring him that "everything had long been decided at the top."
Ruslan Sharshembiev receives a letter from President Sadyr Japarov. Video: Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic
Four Dragons is publishing a copy of an Interpol circular regarding the international search for WhiteBIT beneficiaries. The document was addressed to Izat Dogdurbekov on January 8, 2025. However, according to a decision by the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Kyrgyz Republic, a copy of which was sent to the media by a Four Dragons representative, ten days later Dogdurbekov dropped criminal case No. 03-050-2024-000109A involving WhiteBIT defendants. The Prosecutor’s Office overturned his decision and referred the case for investigation to the Main Investigative Directorate of the State Committee for National Security.
In a media newsletter, a Four Dragons representative claims that WhiteBit "paid" for Izat Dogdurbekov’s 400-person wedding, which allegedly took place on February 25, 2025, at Bishkek’s "most expensive" restaurant, UNO. He also writes that Dogdurbekov "recently" acquired a three-room apartment in central Bishkek and a $40,000 Lexus.
WhiteBIT representatives deny the Four Dragons’ accusations . They claim they did everything they could to find the stolen funds and helped recover some of it.
Kloop sent a request for comment to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic, including Ulan Niyazbekov, Ruslan Sharshembiev, and Izat Dogdurbekov. We also inquired about the fate of 19-year-old Alena Dmitrieva. We have not yet received a response.
Meanwhile, the state’s ties with the crypto business in Kyrgyzstan are reaching a new level. On September 10, the Parliament supported a bill introducing the concepts of "state mining" and "state cryptocurrency reserve." The document provides for the creation of legal conditions for the issuance of stablecoins and tokens backed by real assets. In other words, Kyrgyzstan is creating its own digital financial assets .
For example, Ilan Shor’s A7A5. Despite sanctions against entities associated with him in Kyrgyzstan, the FT discovered that approximately $6 billion more was transferred through this stablecoin in two months . Because of this, the European Commission is proposing sanctions specifically against Ilan Shor’s cryptocurrency, as well as against several banks in Russia, Belarus, and Central Asia associated with it.
Sadyr Japarov in
Moscow
on July 2. Photo: Presidential Press Service
On September 23, the Moldovan news agency IPN reported that Ilan Shor, through a network of proxies, paid Sadyr Japarov for a luxury jet worth $17.9 million.
