Binance sent Russia a client's passport after quitting the market. Exit claims are diligence items

Binance supplied Russian investigators with a client's transaction history plus his date of birth, address, phone number and passport number, along with copies of his Russian passport and Bulgarian residency permit, according to law enforcement documents reviewed by Reuters ^[6]. That happened after the exchange announced in September 2023 that it had fully exited Russia and sold its local business to CommEX ^[5], which is the reason a platform's statements about where it does and does not operate belong in counterparty diligence rather than in a slide deck.

The case: Reuters reported that the material became evidence against Yuri Belenkiy, an IT specialist detained in September 2025 and now awaiting trial in Russia ^[1][2][3]. Russia's Investigative Committee alleges he sent more than $700 in crypto between January 2023 and March 2024 to the Ukrainian military and to a banned organisation that Reuters identified as the group known at different times as the Azov Brigade and the Azov Regiment ^[4]. Crowdfund Insider describes the transfers as totalling a few hundred dollars, made in response to public fundraising appeals associated with an exiled critic of the Kremlin that sought medical equipment and related needs tied to Ukrainian forces ^[7][8].

For anyone running treasury or payments through a centralised venue, the mechanism is the part worth reading twice. According to Crowdfund Insider, investigators reached the exchange through a dedicated contact channel that Binance had previously listed for Russian and Belarusian law enforcement agencies, and the responses containing the client file came back through that channel ^[9][10]. The 2023 announcement had said continued operations in Russia were incompatible with the company's compliance approach, that there was no ongoing revenue-sharing arrangement and no option to reacquire the business, with customer migration and wind-down expected to take up to a year ^[11][12]. Roughly two years separate that announcement from the detention ^[17], and the alleged conduct window itself extends about six months past the exit statement ^[18].

Whether the disclosure was required is contested. Crowdfund Insider reports that legal observers have questioned the obligation to supply anything once the exchange had left the market, and cites one cryptocurrency regulation specialist saying Binance may have faced no obligation and could have been constrained by EU data protection rules given the client's residency in a member state ^[13]. Russia is not recognised as offering an equivalent level of personal data protection under EU standards, which subjects cross-border transfers to strict conditions ^[14].

Binance's spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the company "does not make or enforce the laws of any jurisdiction, determine charges, or decide how any government uses information in legal proceedings" and that, like other global financial institutions, it cooperates with lawful information requests from law enforcement globally, subject to applicable legal, privacy and regulatory requirements ^[15]. It declined to comment on specific confidential law enforcement requests or individual cases ^[16].

The operational read is narrow and unglamorous. A commercial exit does not delete historical records, and it does not necessarily retire the intake channel through which a departed jurisdiction's police can request them ^[9][10]. The diligence questions that follow are which legal entity now holds records for a market a venue has left, what the retention period is, which law enforcement channels remain live after a withdrawal, and whether the subject of a request is ever notified.

Watch the Belenkiy trial, since the evidentiary role of the exchange's response will be tested there ^[3]. Watch also for any EU data protection scrutiny of a transfer to Russia involving a resident of a member state ^[13][14], and for whether Binance or its peers publish anything about post-exit record custody and channel closure.