New year. New front. New gambling legislation for Ukraine.
As Ukrainian armoured and heavy infantry units seek to expand their pocket, or counter-bridgehead, in Russia’s Kursk region, the country’s feisty leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has concurrently opened a new front to clean-up the still-vibrant, but often controversial, gambling industry in his embattled nation.
KRAIL, the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries, which has been rocked by a series of corruption scandals from its very inception in 2020, when betting was formally legalised in Ukraine, has now been consigned to the dustbin of history.
President Zelenskyy has finally enacted Law No. 9256-d, already passed by Ukraine’s wartime Verkhovna Rada parliament on April 1, which bans all gambling advertising, expands regulatory control over the booming sector and aims to bring rogue operators to heel.
Given the centuries of Ukraine’s and Russia’s tied history–Ukraine was a key component of the communist USSR and long fought over in wars between tsarist Russia, Sweden, Poland and Prussia–, it’s been a tangled process to de-link their entwined economies – begun after Putin’s 2014 seizure of the Crimean peninsular and accelerated after Russia’s full-on February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Complexity and Cocaine
And the complexity of de-linkage has not been helped by widespread corruption among the high-level leadership of the now defunct KRAIL.
In August 2021, for example, KRAIL executive Yevhen Hetman was arrested by Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Bureau on charges of taking a US$90,000 bribe (£72,158) to facilitate gaming licences – even in the war-blasted south-eastern region of Zaporizhzhia.
And just before Christmas KRAIL boss Ivan Rudyi was detained for allegedly supporting an online Russian-owned casino operating within Ukraine called Pin-Up.
In defiance of national laws Rudyi took no action to either ban or investigate the iCasino and has since been served with a notice of aiding the “aggressor state”, viz. Russia.
It is further stated that a “large quantity” of cocaine was found in Rudyi’s home during the raid by State Bureau of Investigation officials.
Following President Zelenskyy’s move, KRAIL has now been replaced by a yet-unnamed “central executive body”, high-level Ukrainian sources confirmed to iGamingFuture today.
The new regulatory authority body will be responsible for all branches of retail gambling, iGaming and lotteries under Ukrainian law.
And, in a key compliance upgrade, it will also establish player identification protocols and aggressively promote responsible gambling, setting playtime and spending limits.
