THE KREMLIN`S CRYPTO KING / THE ECONOMIST

The Kremlin’s crypto king

How a convicted fraudster lit the way for Russia’s sanction-busting operations

By Oliver Bullough

Last September Vladimir Putin starred in what may have been 2025’s dullest televised event. 

Flanked by officials and military personnel at the Eastern Economic Forum, the Russian president watched a procession of functionaries explain via videolink how they—and their railway, freight yard, hospital or university—were serving the motherland. 

As a sanctions-squeezed Russia struggles to defeat Ukraine, the broadcast on state TV was meant to reassure viewers that there was nothing to fear, and that their president remained firmly in control. 

But as the feed lurched from a motorway bridge to an airport terminal to a laboratory while Putin looked on expressionlessly, the effect was anything but dynamic.

Most viewers’ eyes will have glazed over long before the 33-minute mark, when the camera cut to two besuited men standing behind a lectern. 

The one who did most of the talking was tubby, balding and visibly nervous: he flapped his arms every time he inhaled, like an anxious penguin. 

There was an echo on the line, and it must have been hard for Putin to follow what he was saying. 

But this, at last, was something worth hearing.

The man, a Moldovan fugitive named Ilan Shor, had created a cryptocurrency pegged to the rouble called A7A5, giving Russian companies, oligarchs and government agencies a much-needed financial bridge to the outside world. 

It had, he said, already enabled more than $100bn-worth of trade. 

By bypassing the traditional banking system, it offered a way around Western sanctions.

Shor is on the run from a 15-year prison sentence after orchestrating a $1bn bank fraud that nearly brought down Moldova’s financial system. 

But the Kremlin seems untroubled by his past. 

His short presentation in September, during which he announced the opening of a new office for A7A5 in Vladivostok, was a sign to the world that he had Putin’s backing.

The astonishing success of Shor’s scheme in allowing a pariah state to trade with the world could have ramifications far beyond the war in Ukraine (though Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm, believes Western sanctions may now finally be affecting the usefulness of the A7A5 coin itself). 

Shor showed how quickly new financial systems can be set up to sidestep even sophisticated sanctions.

“He’s very smart, that’s why he’s such a challenge for us. 

People who investigate financial schemes are always amazed by how sophisticated he is,” said a government official in Moldova. 

“He has created a system. 

Now it’s about sanctions evasion, but it could be for other purposes: to support sabotage, to support terrorists.”

For decades America has relied on its control over the plumbing of the global financial system to force other countries to comply with its wishes, and to ostracise them if they do not. 

For a while, it looked as though dollar-denominated stablecoins such as USDT, issued by Tether, might sidestep this infrastructure. 

But Tether, wary of losing access to American finance, is now trying to stay on the right side of regulators and has begun freezing assets at the request of Western law-enforcement agencies.

As a result, although large volumes of illicit money still pass through Tether, sanctioned oligarchs are wary of leaving assets under the platform’s control for any longer than they have to. 

The magic of Shor’s creation was that it shielded funds until the moment they entered Tether, letting Russian users access the global payments system without as much scrutiny or risk.

Successful sanctions evasion requires constant adaptation. 

Fortunately for Russia, reinvention is what Shor does best. 

His successive incarnations—Moldovan rich kid, businessman, fraudster and politician—now look like preparation for his latest role: the Kremlin’s resident crypto king.

Ilan Shor was born in Tel Aviv in 1987. 

His father Miron had run a theatre in Soviet Moldova but had emigrated to flee the USSR’s entrenched antisemitism. 

When Ilan was barely more than a toddler, the communist state collapsed and his father brought the family back home.

Moldova is squeezed geographically between the Danube and the Dnieper rivers, and politically between Romania and Russia. 

It became independent in 1991 under circumstances that were unpromising even by the standards of other ex-Soviet republics: it lacked raw materials and was riven by ethnic strife. 

But Miron Shor saw opportunities to be exploited. Over the next decade he grew rich by building a successful chain of duty-free shops.

A Moldovan television journalist describes in her memoir how she first met Miron, a heavy-set jowly man, when he organised a fashion show featuring clothes by French designers—a bold move at a time when most Moldovans could barely afford to eat. 

Soon afterwards, she and a colleague interviewed Miron at his office in a rackety hotel in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. 

They were joined by four-year-old Ilan, whom Miron took with him everywhere: “My son Ilan is grown-up now and must know what his parents do, to delve into their business,” Miron explained to his guests. 

“When he’s fully grown, he will also have to join the family business.” 

At one point Ilan interrupted the interview to ask his dad about capital punishment in the Russian empire (“Dad, why did Stolypin hang people? You promised to tell me and forgot”).

Miron continued to indulge his son. 

In 2010 Shor told a reporter from VIP, a Moldovan magazine, that he got his first car at 14, before he was legally allowed to drive (in Moldova the law is negotiable). 

His father, whom Shor described as “my best friend”, funded his teenage business ventures, which included a chain of mobile-phone shops and a print shop. 

“Of course, like any child, I cried sometimes,” Shor told VIP. 

“But I don’t remember what reasons I had to cry. 

Certainly not because of any lack. 

I always got everything I wanted.”

When Ilan was 18, in 2005, Miron died suddenly. 

Ilan assumed control of the family empire, just as his dad had groomed him to do. 

It was clear early on that Ilan’s approach to business would be very different from his father’s. 

Miron had been a modest man, whose lifestyle gave few clues as to his wealth. 

He often spoke about the responsibility of businessmen to invest in society. 

But Ilan was determined to make a splash. 

This was not difficult in Chisinau, where all it took to impress was to drive a fancy car and stand a lot of drinks.

Ilan Shor as a child with his parents

In the interview with VIP, a 23-year-old Shor equivocated over whether Paris or Moscow was his favourite city, boasted about how much Chanel perfume he’d sold, and declared that his favourite marque of car was Mercedes. 

“Who wouldn’t want to be in his place?” asked the journalist. 

Shor said he was inspired by Donald Trump’s maxim that “If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it, go over it, go around it.”

By the early 2000s the former Soviet republics had embraced a wild form of capitalism. 

In Russia, a tiny clique became rich as prices for oil, gas and other natural resources soared. 

These oligarchs spent their windfall on football clubs in England, mansions in France, condos in New York, superyachts, art and influence. 

Shor aspired to live like one, even though, in Moldova, money was in shorter supply.

He had a reputation for organising spectacular parties. 

In 2011 he threw his biggest one yet when he married Sara Semenduyeva, a divorced Russian pop star ten years his senior who goes by her stage name, Jasmin. 

According to local media reports, Shor chartered six planes from Moscow for their guests, who partied in a government building which had been decorated with white silk, gladioli and a carpet of petals.

A year later, Jasmin gave birth to a daughter, Margarita, soon followed by a son, Miron. 

As his family expanded, so did Shor’s business interests. 

He was eager to break into what was then Moldova’s fastest-growing industry: money-laundering.

Most Russian oligarchs preferred to keep their wealth outside the country, aware that the system they had exploited was too arbitrary to trust: if they had stripped assets from weaker rivals, the same could be done to them. 

As a result, tens of billions of dollars flowed out of Russia every year. 

The money would transit through banks in countries such as Latvia or Cyprus—which turned a blind eye to where it had come from—before ending up in London, Zurich or New York.

Moldovan politicians, keen to earn a slice of the fees from processing Russian money transfers, amended laws to make the country’s financial system more accommodating. 

The result was the “Moldovan laundromat”, a complex scheme that moved some $80bn in just four years. 

Much of this money was of dubious origin; some funds were linked to a vast fraud exposed by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian tax lawyer who paid the price for his whistleblowing by being tortured to death in prison.

In 2012 Shor secretly took over a Moldovan bank, using shell companies. 

Then he acquired another one. 

These banks took part in the laundromat on a small scale, but at some point Shor had a brainwave: rather than simply earning fees by moving other people’s money, he could use the banks themselves to extract vast sums of cash. 

As David Smith, a journalist based in Chisinau, put it: “This was different to the laundromat, which just sheared the sheep. 

Shor’s plan was to kill and eat the sheep.”

The astonishing success of Shor’s scheme in allowing a pariah state to trade with the world could have ramifications far beyond the war in Ukraine

Between 2012 and 2014 Shor drained Moldova’s banking system of almost $1bn by issuing himself with fraudulent loans. 

One of Shor’s banks lent money to a shell company, which sent it to accounts in Latvia before returning it to Moldova to repay loans at another of his banks. 

That bank then used this money to issue new loans to other shell companies, which sent it back again—creating a spiral in which ever more money was loaned against funds that had themselves been borrowed. 

A future investigation would describe these loans as having “no sound economic rationale” but instead a “deliberate intention to extract as much benefit as possible for entities connected to Mr Shor”.

Shor used shell companies to get his hands on his third financial institution in 2013, when Moldova’s government sold shares in Banca de Economii, the troubled successor to the country’s Soviet-era savings bank. 

Banca de Economii was bigger than the other two banks, so offered a larger balance sheet to loot, meaning that Shor’s sheep-killing scheme accelerated.

In November 2014 the borrowed money flowed into a Latvian bank account and never came back—Shor had run off with the cash. 

Documents containing information about the money’s whereabouts were packed into a security van, which was later burned. 

In total almost $1bn had vanished from the Moldovan banks’ balance sheets—equivalent to 10% of GDP. 

“One day the music stopped, and there was a big hole left,” said Veronica Dragalin, who served as Moldova’s anti-corruption prosecutor from 2022 to 2025. 

To prevent the financial system collapsing, the government stepped in and covered the losses using public money. 

All three banks were subsequently liquidated.

Kroll, a corporate investigations firm, was commissioned by Moldova’s central bank to examine what had happened. 

In April 2015 its report concluded that Shor was “one of, if not the only beneficiary” of the theft—cementing in many Moldovans’ minds the idea that he was the prime mover behind the fraud.

Shor was arrested in February 2015, but there is still debate about the extent to which he was solely responsible. 

It is difficult to imagine a crime on this scale being carried out in Moldova, one of Europe’s most corrupt countries, without the involvement of senior politicians, bankers and lawyers. 

Many people were involved in approving loans, agreeing the terms of Banca de Economii’s privatisation, and keeping tabs on who was buying shares in the banks. 

The episode suggests that Moldova’s regulatory authorities had—at the very least—succumbed to a virulent outbreak of incompetence.

One Western lawyer who investigated the affair on behalf of a client considering going into business with Shor told me he believed Shor had received only a fraction of the proceeds, most of which would have been gobbled up by Moldova’s rulers and their Russian patrons. 

“Shor is not smart enough, he only has a sort of feral cunning,” said the lawyer, who has met him in person.

In April Vladimir Plahotniuc, an oligarch and former leader of Moldova’s Democratic Party, who dominated the country’s politics for much of the 2010s, was convicted and sentenced to 19 years in prison for his part in the fraud. 

Prosecutors said Plahotniuc helped Shor take control of the defrauded banks as part of a wider criminal conspiracy.

Moldovan authorities have long accused Plahotniuc of having links to pro-Russian networks, but the extent of Russia’s involvement in the fraud is unclear. 

Investigators found that large deposits from Russia had flowed into Shor’s banks, suggesting high-level connections in Moscow. 

However, press reports suggest Russia barred Shor from the country even before his arrest, implying some people there disapproved of his activities.

In May 2015 Shor was put under house arrest. 

He insisted on his innocence, saying that he had been misled about the extent of Banca de Economii’s bad loans when he bought it. 

He said that the banks had collapsed only because Moldovan politicians had spread false rumours, undermining public confidence. 

But he must have known he had little chance of defeating the allegations when both politicians and judges were so eager to make him the scapegoat.

Then Shor had an idea. 

Under Moldovan law, candidates standing for election could not be detained. 

The only way he could regain his freedom was to run for political office.

Orhei is just an hour by bus north of Chisinau, an easy ride through the vineyards and farmland of central Moldova. 

Yet it feels decades behind the capital. 

It’s the kind of town where the Soviet Union never quite finished collapsing, where anyone with ambition left long ago, and where posters advertising cut-price tickets to Germany entice the next generation of school-leavers. 

Market stalls sell cheap Chinese electronics, knock-off designer clothes and slabs of fatty meat. 

When I visited, a glum group of Jehovah’s Witnesses stood on a street corner. 

At a memorial to the second world war, the eternal flame had gone out.

But there was one bright spot, at least until recently. 

If you walk up the hill from the shabby bus station to the centre of town, then down the other side, you will find a free theme park, OrheiLand, complete with carousels, giant slides, rollercoasters and fast-food stands. 

Whereas most of Orhei’s buildings are grey and shoddily built, the theme park is brightly coloured and well-maintained. 

Inside the entrance, a sign declares that this miracle came from the Miron Shor Charitable Foundation, set up by Shor in honour of his father.

In 2015 Ilan Shor stood to be mayor of Orhei as a candidate for Equality, a pro-Russian populist party. 

He won the election easily, and the following year was elected president of Equality, which he renamed the Shor Party. 

The greater his standing in politics, he reasoned, the more untouchable he would become.

Shor is not an obvious politician. 

Anyone watching his televised exchange with Putin could tell he has no charisma. 

He uses impenetrable corporate jargon and looks awkward when speaking in public. 

His Romanian is poor, so he cannot talk to most Moldovans in their first language (his mother tongue is Russian, which is not unusual in Moldova).

But he proved to be a surprisingly effective operator, winning a seat for himself—and with it immunity from prosecution—as well as securing seats for several of his allies. 

Moldovan officials still speak with awe about the electioneering machine he built: he divided the country into regions, or “squares”, then each square into streets, appointing local organisers who mobilised support from their neighbours. 

He made a point of thanking his campaigners personally for their hard work.

Between 2012 and 2014 Shor drained Moldova’s banking system of almost $1bn by issuing himself with fraudulent loans.

Shor adheres almost literally to the principle of “bread and circuses”. 

He set up a chain of shops selling cheap food. 

He promised to secure discounted Russian gas for districts that voted for his party, saying he would transform them into Monaco. 

His charity gave money to schools, hospitals and other causes likely to win favour with the public. 

He promised free Wi-Fi to the people of Orhei and, in the style of a 1990s oligarch, bought the town’s football club. 

“He did all this: the roads, the pavements, the free buses that you see driving around town, that was him,” said a man smoking outside a government office on Orhei’s main drag, smiling with a mouth full of gold teeth. 

“Sure, he stole everything, but he built all this for us.”

Shor’s foray into politics had the desired effect, at least at first. 

Although he was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to seven and a half years (this would later be doubled), his position in Orhei and legal appeals kept him out of prison. 

But after the general election in February 2019 resulted in a progressive coalition, Shor worried that the justice system was about to catch up with him.

The new government was led by Maia Sandu from the pro-European Action and Solidarity Party (PAS), a reformer who had promised to tackle corruption. 

By November the fragile coalition had collapsed and Sandu was ousted. 

A year later, however, she returned in a stronger position, winning the presidential election. 

Although most executive power in Moldova lies with parliament, the presidency gave Sandu a direct mandate and greater authority. 

She pledged to deepen relations with the European Union (EU), a shift that would mean loosening Moldova’s historic ties to Russia. 

By June 2019, fearing the new leadership would have less tolerance for his antics, Shor had fled to Israel.

Shor could not abide Sandu, describing her in interviews as a “hysterical woman”. 

In his interpretation, she was simultaneously too liberal and too fascist: he accused her of promoting “gay parades” and of erasing Russian culture. 

From his haven in Israel, where Moldovan sources allege he benefited from political protection, he set out to undermine Sandu’s pro-European government and steer Moldova back into Russia’s orbit. 

He funnelled money into the Shor Party, helped organise public protests and spread propaganda through television channels and social media.

In mid-2022 Shor turned his attention to Gagauzia, a pro-Russian autonomous region of Moldova: control of it would increase his leverage over national politics. 

He announced plans for another free theme park, GagauziaLand, flooded the region with political organisers, and promised its residents cheap gas. 

His crude yet effective strategies paid off when Evghenia Guțul, a Shor Party candidate with no political experience, was elected head of the province in 2023.

The Kremlin had been keeping a close eye on Shor’s manoeuvres. 

After Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Russian interference in ex-Soviet states increased. 

Moldova sits between Ukraine and Romania, making it strategically significant to the Kremlin, which is desperate to prevent its former vassals from moving closer to the EU and NATO.

Shor, meanwhile, was hungry for cash to fund his audacious electioneering. 

Running theme parks is an expensive business, especially without any income from ticket sales. 

A team of Moldovan undercover journalists who infiltrated Shor’s network noticed that, by 2024, he was receiving money from Promsvyazbank (PSB), a Russian state-owned bank that has been tasked with supporting the defence sector. 

PSB is headed by an economist called Pyotr Fradkov, whose father is a former prime minister and spy chief, and whose brother is a deputy defence minister.

Shor’s wife, Jasmin

At first, Shor moved money directly from Russian bank accounts to Moldovan ones, but when the Moldovan authorities got wind of this they blocked these transfers. 

Things got even more complicated in October 2022 when the American government imposed sanctions on Shor and his wife, cutting them off from the Western financial system. 

In a statement, the State Department said that Shor had worked with “corrupt oligarchs and Moscow-based entities to create political unrest in Moldova” and had tried to thwart the country’s bid to join the EU.

In April 2023 a Moldovan court doubled Shor’s sentence to 15 years. 

Officials tried without success to persuade Israel to extradite Shor. 

In late 2023 he fled to Russia and gained citizenship just a couple of months later. 

Being in Moscow enabled Shor to forge closer ties with the Kremlin, which saw him as key to exerting more influence on Moldova. 

The country was at a critical juncture: in October 2024 it would be holding a presidential election and a referendum on closer integration with the EU.

More money than ever was flowing from Russia to the Shor Party, the bulk of it smuggled by air. 

“They were bringing money in cash, flying people from Moscow. 

There would be a full plane with people, all bringing the amount of cash you don’t have to declare at customs, less than €10,000 [$11,360],” explained Natalia Zaharescu, one of the Moldovan undercover journalists.

But cash shipments made Shor vulnerable. 

The Moldovan authorities deployed sniffer dogs to intercept cash arriving on flights from Moscow, prompting couriers to reroute via Armenia or Turkey. 

Customs officials soon caught on, and seized $1.5m in a single day in May 2024. 

For a time, the authorities appeared to be gaining the upper hand: seizures and tighter controls on bank transfers threatened to paralyse the Shor Party. 

“A lot of people across the network were not happy about that, because they could not access the money,” said Zaharescu.

Shor was forced to get more creative. 

In the run-up to Moldova’s crucial votes that October he and PSB allegedly transferred $39m to thousands of Moldovan citizens through a mobile payments app to fund the pro-Russian campaign. 

Despite expectations of a landslide “yes”, the referendum passed by a margin of less than 1%. 

Sandu narrowly secured victory in the presidential election after being forced into a run-off. 

She blamed the tighter-than-expected results on an “unprecedented” assault by “criminal groups” seeking to “undermine the democratic process”.

Considering the difficulties he had faced in moving money the traditional way, it is not surprising that Shor had started to experiment with cryptocurrencies. 

Andrew Fierman from Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm, said leaked data from within the Shor Party suggested the organisation had been using crypto “to facilitate large-scale transactions” from late 2022. 

At first Shor’s currency of choice was Tether, the stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. 

But Tether relied on dollar-denominated assets to underpin the currency’s value, meaning Western sanctions could theoretically be applied in the future. 

Shor decided he needed something more secure.

“He got experts to build up a system,” said an intelligence source in Chisinau. 

In January 2025 a new cryptocurrency emerged. 

A7A5 is a stablecoin pegged not to the dollar but to the rouble, protecting it from Western sanctions. 

Russian users can leave their wealth in A7A5 until they need to move it, then buy USDT (Tether’s currency) and transfer it immediately. 

It acts as a conduit between roubles and the wider crypto ecosystem, leaving users’ funds exposed for just a few seconds.

There was nothing unusual about its technology—it operates on the same blockchain that Tether uses. 

But the fact that A7A5 was the first rouble-pegged stablecoin, appearing at a time when sanctions were intensifying, meant it quickly gained traction with traders linked to Russian networks, giving it the all-important liquidity needed for a cryptocurrency to take off.

A7A5 was owned by a company called A7, of which Shor controlled 51%, with PSB holding the remainder. 

In March any doubts about the independence of Tether were vindicated when the company co-operated with Western law enforcement and froze $28m of USDT at a Russian crypto exchange. 

Rich Russians who had used Tether to get around Western sanctions were left wondering what to do with their money.

Was Shor their saviour? 

His CV left plenty of room for doubt—after all, not so long ago he had stolen $1bn from a financial system that was helping rich Russians launder money. 

But if oligarchs felt uneasy about entrusting their wealth to Shor, they could take comfort from the involvement of PSB and the well-connected Fradkov. 

In Shor, the Kremlin found the ingenuity it sorely needed to outflank America’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. 

When Shor gave his presentation to Putin in September, Fradkov stood silently beside him—a bulldog-faced banker beside a world-class financial criminal.

In Moldova support for Shor’s political projects appears to have waned in tandem with his readiness to pay the bills. 

In 2024 the authorities confiscated two of Shor’s cars—a vintage Soviet model and a newer Bentley Continental—but when they went up for auction no buyers came forward. 

“They do not want to be associated with the image of this compromised individual,” a bailiff told reporters. 

In December Shor announced the closure of OrheiLand, taking a swipe at Sandu and PAS in the process: “Seven years ago, Ilan Shor transformed an abandoned bit of marshland into the pearl of Orhei,” said a message posted to OrheiLand’s Telegram channel. 

“We understand that the closure of the park will be a great loss for ordinary residents. 

But leaders of PAS don’t care: their families can enjoy themselves in Paris and Dubai.”

Shor, meanwhile, appeared to be enjoying himself in Moscow. 

He moved with his family into a pink and white villa with expansive grounds in a posh suburb. 

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s press secretary, is a neighbour; Shor’s wife, Jasmin, goes skiing with Peskov’s third wife, Tatiana Navka, who won a gold medal for ice dancing at the 2006 Winter Olympics. 

Jasmin’s Instagram posts give an insight into the Shor family’s luxurious lifestyle. 

There are skiing trips, white-sand beaches with hammocks hanging from palm trees, music videos set in a faux Bedouin camp, and an endless parade of Russian celebrities. 

Even when they’re at home, she and the children dress as though they’re attending a gala evening. 

Shor himself channels the look of a 1990s oligarch: chunky leisurewear, heavy gold necklaces and oversized jackets, the top button of his shirts unfastened beneath wide-knotted ties (he makes sure to button up when talking to Putin).

In April Grinex, the main platform where the currency is traded, was reportedly hacked—an attack its owners blamed on Western spies. 

The cryptocurrency itself, however, continued to flourish, in spite of a growing bundle of Western sanctions placed on it and associated entities. 

According to a company source, by May A7A5 was facilitating $8.5bn-worth of trade each month. 

Russian journalists reported that Turkey used the cryptocurrency to pay for Russian gas, and that drone manufacturers used it to buy components from China. 

Several of Russia’s richest men were said to be using A7A5.

By enabling Russians to make transactions, A7A5 knocked a hole in the West’s attempts to isolate them and their money. 

“We’re talking about billions of dollars that are now accessible to the Russian regime on the blockchain, which is a significantly better position than they were in before this point of access,” said Fierman from Chainalysis.

The blockchain technology that underpins cryptocurrencies means that each transaction is public, though the identity of the cryptocurrencies’ owners isn’t. 

It is noticeable how trade in A7A5 happened overwhelmingly during Russian business hours, with the proportion of large transactions compared with small ones being far higher than for most rival stablecoins. 

The obvious conclusion is that A7A5 was being bought and sold by major companies operating in or with Russia, rather than by—as is usual for other cryptocurrencies—a small army of enthusiasts who trade lesser amounts any day of the week.

Last October A7A5 sponsored a crypto conference in Dubai. 

Almost all the delegates were Russian, or at least Russian speakers, and sanctions evasion was a primary topic of conversation. 

Even the free ice-creams were sponsored by a company helping Russians extract money from their homeland, one of a growing number of startups trying to do for ordinary people what A7A5 does for tycoons and corporations.

“We’re talking about billions of dollars that are now accessible to the Russian regime on the blockchain, which is a significantly better position than they were in before this point of access”

Shor couldn’t make it: he is wanted by Interpol because of his fraud conviction. 

Instead A7A5 was represented by its director for regulatory and overseas affairs, Oleg Ogienko, an intense grey-haired man with the wiry build of a long-distance runner. 

Young men at the firm’s stand were handing out stickers featuring Russian matryoshka dolls and the slogan “Stake it till you make it”. 

Visitors could spin a wheel and win prizes—a lanyard, a T-shirt, more stickers and, though no one seemed to win this one, a promissory note for 10,000 roubles ($128). 

Ogienko seemed happy to sit down with people for long chats about how he could help their businesses.

When I spoke to him at the conference, he shrugged off the sanctions on A7A5. 

“We’re already accustomed to these actions from our respected colleagues in the West,” he said with deadpan irony. 

“We understand that this is a step to reduce competition for the services of European, American and British companies. 

It’s a competitive battle, putting us on the sanctions list and accusing us of laundering money, which of course we’re not doing.”

Ogienko’s speech was well attended. 

He laid out A7A5’s business model and some recent innovations, including the “cryptonote”—a kind of new-school travellers cheque that you buy in Moscow and cash in other countries. 

It was notable that Shor’s name never came up. 

When I spoke to Ogienko beforehand he downplayed Shor’s influence on the company. 

“He’s a shareholder, I’d say that. 

And as a shareholder, he is empowered to take various actions through the corporate structure, and to express his position to the management for it to be adopted,” said Ogienko. 

“Just like at any Western company.”

But Shor has more influence than Ogienko is letting on: after all, it was Shor who spoke to Putin in September, referring to himself as the “general director” of A7. 

Ogienko said Shor would not comment for this article, and Shor did not reply to messages sent via his profile on VKontakte, a Russian social-media platform.

Shor conducts much of A7’s business through Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. 

The country has emerged as a key intermediary in Russian efforts to evade sanctions and trade with the outside world. 

Western countries have imposed sanctions on several banks in Kyrgyzstan, including one that American officials claim is linked to Shor. 

At a speech at the United Nations last September, Sadyr Japarov, the president of Kyrgyzstan, furiously contested the sanctions, claiming they were based on “false information”. 

Meanwhile, he has continued to provide a haven for Shor’s project. According to media reports, Shor has provided Japarov with a private jet.

He has also been careful to cultivate support among ordinary Kyrgyz much as he did in Moldova, funding a new Russian-language television station and a shop selling subsidised food. 

Last August he opened a park in Bishkek called Eurasia. 

Its mascots are a bear in traditional Russian dress and a snow leopard in a Kyrgyz felt hat, which dance in AI-generated animations to irritatingly catchy tunes. 

The theme park shares its name with a political foundation which Shor has set up to campaign for closer ties between Russia and its former colonies. 

Fradkov sits with him on the board, along with senior Russian legislators and propagandists.

Last year A7 opened offices in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and plans to expand into other African countries and South America, as part of a push to widen Russian trade links. 

But according to the blockchain experts at Elliptic, A7A5 users are becoming more worried about the possibility of their funds being frozen at the point of conversion into USDT, and trading on Shor’s cryptocurrency has fallen precipitously in recent months. 

It may be that A7A5 won’t be used by wealthy Russians for much longer. 

But in creating it, Shor has provided a model for anyone looking to create a financial system free from Western scrutiny, control or oversight. 

Sanctioned regimes in Iran, China, Cuba or North Korea may be tempted to create a similar currency.

Shor’s career is unprecedented in modern Russia. 

Few if any foreigners have succeeded in embedding themselves so deeply in the Kremlin’s power structures, but then no one else promised to be quite so useful to Putin’s most important project: defeating Ukraine. 

Shor’s talent for entrepreneurship—something the Russian state is notoriously bad at—could still help Putin out of the hole he’s found himself in. 

“They are planning to expand their business of sanctions evasion, by building a free financial zone,” said the intelligence source in Moldova. 

“They are building this coalition of states that are not happy with the Western order, and [Shor] has shown them now that it can be changed. 

They’re beginning to trust this.”

Oliver Bullough is the author of “Moneyland” and “Butler to the World”. His most recent book is “Everybody Loves Our Dollars”