The European Union, after a slow start, has increasingly tried to disrupt them.
Now, with recent measures targeting crypto actors in third countries, “we are definitely moving into a next phase of EU sanctions strategy when it comes to digital assets,” said Isabella Chase, head of policy for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at TRM Labs.
Kharon reviewed and catalogued each of the EU’s crypto sanctions measures dating to their first appearance in a Russia package, four months into the war. Together, they chart a rapid evolution in the bloc’s crypto strategy — from imposing limited and narrow crypto-trading restrictions to wider bans and sanctions targeting key exchanges, currencies, and the often-international infrastructure that prop them all up.
It’s “really a story of both the [European] Commission growing in confidence and understanding the technology and how you can pull different sanctions levers to target different parts of it,” Chase said, “while simultaneously you see sanctioned actors themselves becoming more fluent in how they use crypto, and then also beginning to really share that playbook on what is effective and what works well among themselves.”
It’s “cat-and-mouse, whack-a-mole,” she added, “all the analogies we’re forever using in crypto.”
Rewind: The onset of financial sanctions after Russia’s full-scale invasion incentivized it to identify and develop alternatives to the euro and dollar. But despite warnings from policymakers about the potential back channels crypto could provide, they didn’t sprout up immediately.
2022 was “such a different time for digital assets to where we are now,” Chase said.
The Russian side: The rise of the A7 network and its A7A5 stablecoin, designed specifically to circumvent sanctions, was a game-changer.
“Illicit crypto volume reached an all-time high of USD 158 billion in 2025, up nearly 145% from 2024,” TRM’s 2026 Crypto Crime Report found. Close to half of that volume, it said, ”was led by actors sanctioned in connection to the A7A5 token ($72B USD), with an additional $39B USD in the A7 wallet.”
Now, as The Brief has reported, some exchanges in and outside of Russia openly offer to help Russians skirt sanctions. And in a sign of Russia’s growing reliance on crypto for cross-border transactions, legislators passed a law last month allowing Russians to “buy and sell major digital assets through Central Bank-regulated intermediaries,” as the Moscow Times reported. Meanwhile, domestic payments through crypto remain banned.
The EU side: With some of its crypto measures since the start of the war, the EU has lagged behind not only such Russian maneuvering but also other Western jurisdictions.
The U.S., for instance, sanctioned the prolific, A7-linked Russian exchange Garantex in April 2022, two months after Moscow’s full-scale invasion, accusing it of processing over $100 million in transactions “associated with illicit actors and darknet markets.”The EU followed with its own Garantex designation — its first targeting a Russia-based crypto exchange — just under three years later. (That lag was despite the fact that Garantex had roots in Estonia, an EU member state.)
Yes, but: The Union’s eventual sanctions on Garantex had a clear impact, Chase said, leading its $100-million-a-day crypto flows to “drop off almost immediately” and shift to other high-risk exchanges. Chief among those was Grinex, an effective rebrand — which the U.S., U.K., EU, and others soon sanctioned as well.
“In [the crypto sanctions] world, that’s kind of all you can hope for,” Chase said. “You’re trying to constrain activity and make it more expensive for sanctioned entities to wind down their operations and spin up new infrastructure.”
The EU has gotten involved outside of sanctions of late, too: In March, Europol supported the U.S., Germany, and Finland in their seizure and takedown of Garantex’s primary online domain.
The EU’s latest:
sanctions on four A7-related entities, including in Africa;
transaction bans in April that targeted specific crypto service platforms in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Panama, and the UAE;
and, in an escalation against those kinds of facilitators, the addition of a new power to ban all crypto platforms in listed third countries.
That was all in April’s 21st Russia package. Next up, according to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas: a 22nd package this fall, with “the most far-reaching sanctions listings since the start of the war.”
Expect more crypto measures to be a part of it.
Data Points columns zero in on the numbers behind global trade, international sanctions, and illicit finance.
Read more from The Brief: