The transfers Yuri Belenkiy made added up to just over $700. Russian prosecutors have built a terrorism financing case on that sum — and the evidence trail they assembled originated with Binance.
Citing law enforcement documents, Reuters reported Monday that the exchange named Belenkiy, an IT specialist from Russia, as the person behind the transfers. According to the report, Binance also supplied his date of birth, home address, phone number and passport number, along with scans of both his Russian passport and his Bulgarian residency permit.
None of that is a transaction hash. It amounts to a full identity dossier on someone now facing prison in Russia over donations to Ukraine.
He’s been in jail since September
Belenkiy was detained by Russian authorities in September 2025, and he is still behind bars awaiting trial.
According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, the payments were made between January 2023 and March 2024 after an appeal by Arkady Babchenko, a Kremlin critic living in exile. The funds were earmarked for the Ukrainian military and for a group linked to the Azov Brigade — an organization Moscow labels as terrorist.
With that label attached, a $700 donation is no longer charity in the eyes of the state; it’s a charge that carries serious prison time.
The email address is the part that should worry you
After requesting Belenkiy’s transaction history, investigators reportedly received two replies from case@binanceholdings.ru. That address was the one Binance’s own website had directed Russian and Belarusian law enforcement agencies to use.
This, in other words, was neither a leak nor a subpoena that slipped past a compliance gap. It was an intake channel the exchange itself published, aimed squarely at those agencies.
Binance’s law enforcement guidelines as they stand today state that a valid court order, police order or warrant is required before user information is released in a criminal probe. Which of those the company received in this instance, it has not said publicly.
Binance said it had left Russia in 2023
Then there’s the timeline. In September 2023, Binance offloaded its Russian business to CommEX, saying at the time that continued operation in the country was incompatible with its compliance strategy. The company added that no revenue-sharing arrangement and no buyback option would remain in place.
Yet the disclosure to investigators happened after that sale closed. And the alleged payment window — January 2023 through March 2024 — sits on both sides of it.
Exiting a market cleanly is fundamentally a claim about what you have stopped doing there. Fielding law enforcement requests out of that same market via a dedicated .ru inbox makes that claim considerably harder to sustain.
What Binance will and won’t say
Per Reuters’ report, Binance’s position is that it cooperates with lawful law enforcement requests, subject to applicable legal, privacy and regulatory requirements.
The company would not comment on Belenkiy’s case specifically. Nor would it address whether the disclosure might have violated European data protection rules — the question that carries the most weight for every non-Russian customer reading this, since Belenkiy held a Bulgarian residency permit.
Binance had not responded to our request for comment by the time of writing.
How the documents got out
The case files surfaced via The First Department, a group that assists defendants in Russian political prosecutions. One of Belenkiy’s relatives passed the documents to the organization.
Put differently: this story exists in public only because a family member walked paperwork over to a legal aid group. No regulator surfaced it. No transparency report, and no disclosure from the exchange.
For anyone using a centralized exchange, that’s the takeaway with real teeth. Your know your customer file is one document that can be forwarded onward, and you may only learn where it ended up years afterward — from somebody’s relative.
The privacy pitch gets a live test
Shielded chains have been pointing to scenarios exactly like this one for years, and Zcash is now about to be judged against the argument.
The goals of Zcash’s Tachyon upgrade are to scale shielded payments, strengthen quantum readiness, and prove whether its funding, security, and governance can hold up. It’s those last three items carrying the real weight. Scaling shielded payments is an engineering challenge; preserving funding, security and governance while doing so is precisely what has sunk privacy projects in the past.
Belenkiy sits in a Russian jail cell today, and the most damaging evidence against him is a file that an exchange compiled long before he was ever a suspect. If you’re sending money to anything some government labels terrorism, work on the assumption that such a file exists, that an email address has been published for obtaining it, and behave accordingly.