I read that as part of the sanctions against Russia, they block Mastercard and Visa transactions for all customers of Bank Rossiya.

That seems to me like the most serious sanctions yet, because regular people are affected, at home, in Russia. Not sure how big / commonly used in Russia.

I guess, if anything else happens, they'll consider blocking Mastercard and Visa across all Russia. This is the approach they used against Wikileaks, Julian Assange etc.

However, this will cost money, for Visa / Mastercard. It's one thing to block an individual (Assange) and quite another to block a whole country - lost profits.


  • How common is it for people in Russia to have Visa / Mastercard....? I have heard that a lot of people just don't have it.
  • Do people mostly have debit card (just withdraws the sum from your bank account) or credit cards (you spend money you don't actually have, and pay it later)
  • Would you consider it a serious problem if you couldn't use your Visa / Mastercard.


I wanted to pay for a service in Russia a while back, and it was EXTREMELY hard because you could not pay with any payment methods that are available to me (Mastercard, Visa, Paypal). WebMoney is blocked in UK and it took me a very long time to set up an account pretending to be in another country. Maybe Russia can set up it's own Visa alternative, or people will use bitcoin.