How Tajikistan’s Banks Help Russian Citizens Bypass SWIFT Ban

A recent investigation by the Russian outlet The Bell revealed that Russia’s Sberbank, the country’s largest bank, bypasses Western sanctions by sending its clients’ funds to European bank accounts using Central Asian banks as intermediaries.

Sberbank, a state-owned banking and financial services company headquartered in Moscow, is among the leading banks in Europe by market capitalization. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Sberbank, like most Russian banks, was sanctioned by the United States on February 24 and by the European Union on July 21 of that year. The bank was subsequently cut off from SWIFT, the international financial messaging network through which banking systems of different countries communicate with each other. The international payment systems Visa and Mastercard left Russia soon afterwards. In the wake of the sanctions, Sberbank withdrew from the European market, closed its office in the United Arab Emirates, and sold its subsidiary in Kazakhstan.

Despite this fallout, The Bell discovered that Sberbank’s customers can open the bank’s mobile app and send up to 500,000 rubles (approximately $6,300) per transfer or up to 3,000,000 rubles (approximately $38,200) per month to Europe using bank card numbers of at least two European neobanks – the British-Lithuanian Revolut and German N26. If the recipient of the funds in Europe were to check the statement accompanying those transactions, they wouldn’t see Sberbank as the bank of origin but rather find a random Central Asian name and Dushanbe or Tashkent as the origin of the funds.

In the late 2010s, the central banks of Tajikistan and Russia started working on closer integration of the countries’ banking systems, owing to the large volume of trade- and labor remittances-related money transfers between the two. The integration essentially eliminated all intermediaries between the two banking systems, from international systems like SWIFT to private payment agents like Zolotaya Korona. As a result, the Russian and the Tajik governments increased control over incoming and outgoing funds, making money transfers between the two countries faster, cheaper, and independent from any geopolitical concerns outside of the relationship between Russia and Tajikistan. In 2023 alone, the volume of labor remittances from Russia to Tajikistan totalled $5.7 billion, most of which was transferred via the direct channels between the banking systems of the two countries and was therefore invisible to SWIFT. This integration closely mirrors similar efforts that Russia made in its relationships with China and Iran.

While Russian banks have lost access to Western markets in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, banks in Tajikistan have remained a part of international systems like SWIFT and Visa Direct, a real-time mechanism of payment delivery directly to financial accounts using card credentials. There are currently 16 banks and 25 microcredit deposit organizations (MCDOs) registered in Tajikistan. Only three of those MCDOs (IMON International, Humo, and Vasl) and 11 banks have access to Visa Direct, allowing them to deposit money received from Russian banks into European bank accounts.

Dushanbe City Bank, for example, has been mentioned in several online ads offering banking services to Russian citizens via private third parties, along with another Tajik bank, IBT, and the Kyrgyz Bakay and MBank banks. The bank was founded in 2007 under the Avesto Group, a conglomerate closely tied to Tajikistan’s ruling family.

A typical third-party ad of this kind offers Russian citizens for just 16,999 rubles (approximately $215) an opportunity to remotely order and receive within a week a Visa- and SWIFT-connected bank card from “a Tajik online microcredit deposit organization that has been on the market for 14 years.” Some ads specify that the MCDO could not be named because “Visa and Mastercard monitor the Internet to identify any organizations that offer banking services to Russian citizens.”

Serving as an intermediary for sanctioned Russian banks would put Central Asian banks in violation of both domestic and international anti-money laundering, counterterrorism financing, and customer due diligence laws and standards. Such violations, if proven, could result in the suspension of a banking license, a ban from systems like SWIFT and Visa, and other international sanctions. In January 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned “a Kyrgyz Republic-based financial institution” that allegedly helped facilitate Russia’s sanctions evasion schemes.

“If Revolut learns about this [scheme] and passes [the findings of The Bell’s investigation] to Visa, the intermediary bank in Tajikistan will be found quickly because these actions are a serious violation,” an expert on Tajikistan’s banking system who asked to remain anonymous out of safety concerns told The Diplomat.

Both Revolut and N26, the European banks identified in The Bell’s reporting, responded to the outlet’s questions by outlining their policies to comply with sanctions and warning that the evasion scheme The Bell reported on would violate their terms of service.