KuCoin has stopped serving users in Russia and Belarus. In a notice dated Thursday 29 October 2026, the Seychelles-based exchange said it was ending access to all of its products, services and features for users in the two countries with immediate effect, citing “applicable legal and regulatory requirements”. The announcement on KuCoin’s site gives no public date by which customers must withdraw: each affected user is to receive a personal notification with deadlines and instructions.
That makes KuCoin the third large offshore exchange in under two weeks to cut off Russian and Belarusian customers, after Bitget on 16 October and MEXC on 20 October. It also lands on the day the Bank of Russia named the first self-regulatory body for the country’s licensed crypto exchanges, as Moscow builds a domestic market that residents are meant to use instead.
KuCoin has not said how many accounts are affected. It has not named any sanctions regime either. In a post on X the same day, quoted by Cointelegraph, the exchange wrote: “Compliance is at the core of our operations and guides our decisions on where and how we offer our services.”
What the KuCoin Russia notice says, and what it leaves out
The notice is short. It carries a page stamp of 20:21 on 29 October, with no time zone given, and it is published in English and in Russian, where the Russian page carries a machine-translation disclaimer. It makes four points.
- Services for users in Russia and Belarus end at once, across every KuCoin product and feature.
- Users who are affected will get a notification setting out their own deadlines and the steps for an orderly wind-down, in practice closing open positions and withdrawing assets.
- Users who have received no notification do not need to do anything; their accounts stay subject to KuCoin’s Terms of Use and any restrictions in force.
- Questions about account status go to KuCoin customer support, and the exchange warns against phishing, asking users to rely only on its official channels.
The gaps are just as telling. There is no list of what stays open during the wind-down, so it is not clear whether accounts switch to a withdrawal-only mode, how long that lasts, or whether the peer-to-peer market and rouble rails are cut along with everything else. There is no figure for affected users. And “immediate effect” sits oddly next to a process in which the actual deadlines arrive later, user by user.
Cointelegraph set the move against the sanctions that the United States and Europe have imposed on Russia and Belarus over the war in Ukraine, which many crypto firms now apply. KuCoin’s own text does not use the word sanctions, and Cointelegraph’s report gives no deadline or user figure either.
How do I get my money out of KuCoin from Russia or Belarus?
Based on the notice alone, the answer is: wait for KuCoin’s individual message and follow it. The exchange says the notification will carry the deadlines and the instructions for closing positions and moving funds out. Until it arrives, a user has no public date to work from.
The message should come through KuCoin’s own channels. The exchange warns about phishing, and an exit like this is an easy cover for scammers: a message that asks for a password, a seed phrase or a “verification” transfer is not a wind-down instruction.
A user who gets no notice is told the account continues under the existing terms, but the notice does not say how KuCoin decides which accounts are affected. Bitget’s exit shows how short these windows can be: its users had about five days between the first emails on 16 October and the last withdrawal date.
Where the funds can go is a separate problem for Russian residents, because the rules at home are tightening. The Bank of Russia reads its crypto law as ending peer-to-peer deals between individuals on 1 July 2027 and barring transfers from regulated accounts to self-custody wallets, as set out in our report on Russia’s plan to end P2P crypto in July 2027.
Why KuCoin says it is leaving: compliance, the US plea and the Austrian licence
KuCoin cites compliance. It has not named its American criminal case or its European licence as factors, and no source links them to the Russian exit. They are, however, the two places where regulators have looked hardest at how the exchange screens its customers, which is why they belong in the background.
The US plea of January 2025
On 27 January 2025, Peken Global Limited, the Seychelles company that operates KuCoin, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to one count of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors said the exchange had failed to keep effective anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer programmes and had never registered with FinCEN, the US Treasury’s financial crimes unit.
The penalties added up to about $297 million: a criminal fine of $112.9 million and a forfeiture of $184.5 million. KuCoin agreed to leave the US market for at least two years. Its founders, Chun Gan and Ke Tang, each agreed to two-year deferred prosecution agreements and to forfeit $2.7 million, and gave up any role in running the company, the Justice Department said, as reported by Claims Journal. The case was about licensing and money-laundering controls; the plea coverage we reviewed does not include a sanctions charge.
The Austrian MiCA licence and the FMA’s orders
In Europe, KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH in Vienna received authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider under MiCA from Austria’s Financial Market Authority on 27 November 2025, which gives it a passport to offer services across the European Economic Area. Within three months it was in trouble. On 19 February 2026 the FMA prohibited it from taking on new business because the posts of AML officer and sanctions compliance officer, and their deputies, were no longer filled as the law requires, according to the FMA’s notice of 18 May 2026.
At the time, Sabina Liu, managing director of KuCoin EU, told Cointelegraph that two compliance staff had left and called the issue “contained and limited in scope”. The FMA lifted the new-business ban on 18 May, once the positions had been filled again. But the same notice says KuCoin EU still may not commence business operations, under a separate decision of 18 February 2026, because governance requirements and further senior management posts were still outstanding. We found no later FMA statement saying that second restriction has been lifted.
So regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have questioned how KuCoin staffs its compliance, and in Vienna the gap was the sanctions officer’s post itself. None of this is cited by KuCoin as a reason. Its notice refers only to legal and regulatory requirements, and it does not say whether any authority asked it to leave Russia and Belarus.
Bitget, MEXC and now KuCoin: three exits in thirteen days
The three departures follow a similar pattern, with one difference: KuCoin and MEXC published notices, while Bitget did not. Coindaro reported on 17 October that Bitget had added Russia and Belarus to the prohibited countries in its Terms of Use, updated on 16 October, and that user emails reported by Russian and Belarusian media set a trading stop on 18 October and a withdrawal deadline of 21 October, both at 07:00 UTC. The details are in our piece on Bitget giving Russian and Belarusian users until 21 October.
MEXC announced on 20 October that it was ending services for users in Russia and Belarus as part of what it called its global compliance efforts, according to The Defiant and other outlets. Its process matches the one KuCoin now describes: individual notices, sent by email and in the app according to several of those reports, with each user’s timeline, and no action for users who receive none.
| Exchange | Announced | Countries | Public deadline | Stated reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitget | Terms updated 16 October (no public notice) | Russia, Belarus (Kazakhstan already listed in September) | None published; user emails gave 21 October, 07:00 UTC | None given |
| MEXC | 20 October | Russia, Belarus | None; individual notices | Global compliance efforts |
| KuCoin | 29 October | Russia, Belarus | None; individual notices | Applicable legal and regulatory requirements |
None of the three has said what changed in October to trigger the move. All three are offshore platforms that were still serving Russian users more than four and a half years after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the first rounds of Western sanctions. KuCoin itself paused Russian-issued Visa and Mastercard cards for rouble purchases in 2022, but said at the time that its P2P service was unaffected. It stayed open to Russian customers until this week.
MEXC is also leaving France, on a separate timetable that runs to 5 March 2027, as set out in our report on MEXC’s four-stage French exit.
Russia builds its own market: NAUFOR, 23 exchanges and the wallet limits
On the same Thursday, the Bank of Russia approved NAUFOR, the National Association of Securities Market Participants, as the first self-regulatory organisation for crypto exchanges and digital depositories, according to Interfax as reported by Bitcoin Magazine. NAUFOR, founded in 1996, has 725 members, from brokers and dealers to fund managers, and earlier in October it received the same status for operators of information systems.
The central bank’s registry now lists 23 crypto exchanges and eight digital depositories, among them VTB, Sberbank and units of T-Technologies, the group behind T-Bank. Each firm on the registry has 90 days to join a self-regulatory body. Our own count of the exchange register was 17 names on 23 October, up from four on 6 October, as we reported in our piece on Russia’s licensed crypto exchangers and the Sberbank and VTB plans.
The framework rests on the law “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights”, passed by the State Duma in July. It lets non-qualified retail investors buy up to 300,000 roubles of crypto a year, about $3,800, through a single intermediary, while qualified investors have higher limits. Paying for goods and services in crypto inside Russia stays banned. The Moscow Exchange has been testing crypto trading with professional participants and plans to launch it in December, and Sberbank has been approved to hold bitcoin and other crypto in custody, according to Bitcoin Magazine.
Also on 29 October, Vladimir Chistyukhin, first deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, said that investing through non-custodial wallets inside the regulated framework would be ruled out, while cross-border payments through such wallets would be allowed, according to Journal du Coin citing the TASS news agency. No legal text was published with the remarks. The same report notes that Russia’s largest banks have had to support the digital rouble since 1 September 2026.
No source ties KuCoin’s exit to the Russian law, and the timing on 29 October may be a coincidence. But the two moves point the same way: foreign offshore venues are closing to Russian residents while the state builds licensed domestic ones with annual caps, registries and supervision, and narrows the routes in and out through private wallets and P2P deals.
What it changes for users outside Russia and Belarus
For customers elsewhere, the notice changes nothing directly: users who have not received a notification are told to do nothing. In the US, KuCoin agreed in its January 2025 plea to leave the market for at least two years, which runs to January 2027 at the earliest. It has not announced any plan to return.
In the European Union, the relevant fact is the status of KuCoin EU’s Austrian authorisation and the restriction the FMA described in May, not this week’s notice. The Russian exit also has nothing to do with France, where MEXC is the exchange leaving. For anyone comparing platforms, licence status in the reader’s own country is the first thing to check, as explained in our guide to choosing a crypto exchange.
A centralised exchange holds its customers’ coins in its own wallets, which is why a decision taken by a company in the Seychelles can cut a user’s access overnight. In a wind-down, what a customer keeps is decided by the withdrawal window the exchange grants.
Open questions and the dates to watch
Several facts are still missing. KuCoin has not disclosed the deadline it is giving users, the number of accounts involved, whether withdrawals stay open in the meantime, whether its P2P desk and rouble payment routes are part of the cut, or the precise legal basis it is relying on. The exact time of the notice in UTC is not stated on the page.
The next dates come from Russia rather than from KuCoin. Firms on the Bank of Russia’s registries have 90 days to join a self-regulatory body such as NAUFOR. The Moscow Exchange plans to open crypto trading in December. And P2P crypto deals between individuals are due to become illegal on 1 July 2027. The first individual KuCoin notices, and the deadlines they carry, should show how much time Russian and Belarusian users actually have.