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Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine for IT Development Alexander Bornyakov appealed to the American authorities against the background of a number of bitcoin exchanges leaving the Ukrainian market due to regulatory requirements and problems of identifying users from Crimea. This is evidenced by documents obtained by CoinDesk.
Reporters accessed emails of former US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Due to the situation with Crimea, in 2020, the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Ministry of Finance (OFAC) imposed sanctions on a number of individuals. Against this background, several exchanges stopped serving users from Ukraine.
It follows from the documents that in October 2020, Bornyakov applied for clarifications to the US Department of State and Treasury.
He asked the US authorities to clarify the regulatory requirements and noted that Ukraine is not affected by the sanctions and restrictions related to Crimea.
Bornyakov confirmed ForkLog’s appeal to the US Treasury. The official never received an answer.
“This year we intend to once again contact the US authorities and look forward to a positive outcome of the negotiations,” he said.
CoinDesk found that participants in the cryptocurrency industry and other interested parties in a number of letters approached the US authorities in an attempt to clarify and resolve various regulatory issues. Some of them were redirected to lower-level officials, others were left unanswered.
Recall that in September 2020, the Bittrex cryptocurrency exchange announced the termination of services to users from Ukraine and a number of other countries for “regulatory reasons.”
The Ministry of Finance of Ukraine said that Bittrex was forced to stop serving residents of the country due to problems with the identification of users from Crimea.
As experts explained to ForkLog, in order to comply with the requirements of the sanctions list and preserve the license, cryptocurrency platforms must verify that the user is not from Crimea.
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