A Russian shipyard supplier best known for arming warships just patented a way to put its naval gun on wheels, and the design tells a story about a much larger program that appears to have stalled. Saint Petersburg-based Arsenal Machine-Building Plant, the manufacturer behind Russia’s AK-100, AK-130, AK-726 and A-192M naval guns, has patented a […]A military aircraft has crashed in Russia’s Moscow region near the town of Zvenigorod, with the pilot reportedly ejecting before impact, according to Russian local media and Telegram channels reporting from the scene. Footage circulating from the crash site shows wreckage and emergency response activity near Zvenigorod, roughly 40 miles (65 km) west of central […]Researchers found Chinese and Russian SDKs in Android apps marketed to U.S. military users, highlighting software supply chain and enterprise privacy risks.
The post Third-Party SDKs Raise Privacy Questions for Apps Marketed to U.S. Military appeared first on TechRepublic.
Researchers found Chinese and Russian SDKs in Android apps marketed to U.S. military users, highlighting software supply chain and enterprise privacy risks.
The post Third-Party SDKs Raise Privacy Questions for Apps Marketed to U.S. Military appeared first on TechRepublic.
A Ukrainian F-16 pilot did something no American-made fighter jet had confirmed doing before in this war: shoot down a Russian warplane in air-to-air combat. General Dan Caine, the four-star Air Force officer who serves as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and holds the highest military rank in the United States, told the […]
Russia’s State Duma has moved crypto regulation toward its final legislative stage, advancing a bill that would establish formal rules for mining, exchanges, and cross-border settlement activity.
The bill, listed as No. 636524-8, is aimed at creating a statutory framework for parts of the digital asset sector that have already become active inside and around Russia’s economy. The measures include mandatory registries for industrial miners, licensing requirements for crypto exchanges, and legal treatment for certain cross-border settlement uses.
That makes the legislation important even for markets outside Russia.
Crypto regulation is increasingly becoming a matter of national payment strategy, energy policy, sanctions exposure, and institutional oversight. Russia’s approach reflects that wider trend: governments are no longer asking whether crypto exists. They are deciding how to control it.
Russia has been a major part of the crypto conversation for years, especially around mining and cross-border payments.
The country has access to energy resources, a technically skilled population, and strong incentives to explore alternative settlement channels. At the same time, it faces sanctions pressure and a complicated relationship with the global financial system.
That makes crypto regulation more than a domestic compliance question.
If Russia formalizes rules for mining and cross-border crypto settlement, it could affect exchange oversight, industrial power usage, institutional access, and international payment flows.
The bill appears to create a more structured environment rather than leaving activity in a grey zone.
For miners, mandatory registries could bring more oversight but also more legal clarity. For exchanges, licensing rules could define who is allowed to operate. For cross-border settlement, the law could give state-approved entities clearer permission to use digital assets in specific contexts.
Mining is one of the most important parts of Russia’s crypto policy debate.
Industrial mining consumes power, creates exportable digital assets, and can become a source of revenue. But it also raises questions around grid stability, taxation, regional energy use, and illegal operations.
A registry model gives the state more visibility.
That may help authorities separate approved industrial miners from informal or unauthorized activity. It can also create a route for taxation and compliance monitoring.
For the mining industry, the trade-off is familiar.
Regulation can add reporting burdens and costs, but it can also reduce uncertainty. Companies operating at scale often prefer a defined legal framework to constant ambiguity.
That is especially true when mining is connected to energy contracts, data centre infrastructure, and capital investment.
The cross-border settlement provisions are likely to attract the most international attention.
Digital assets can move across borders without relying on traditional correspondent banking rails. That makes them useful in some trade contexts, but also sensitive from a sanctions and compliance standpoint.
Russia’s interest in crypto settlement should be viewed through that lens.
A legal framework could allow certain companies or institutions to use digital assets in international trade under state-approved conditions. That would not mean all crypto payments become legal or unrestricted. It would mean Russia is creating a formal route for specific use cases.
The key is how narrow or broad those permissions become.
If the law is tightly controlled, it may mostly support selected trade channels. If it is broader, it could create a larger domestic market for crypto-linked settlement services.
Either way, the development is part of a global pattern. Countries are exploring how digital assets fit into payment systems, sanctions policy, and trade infrastructure.
It is important not to confuse regulation with openness.
A government can legalize certain crypto activities while still maintaining strict control. Licensing, registries, and approved settlement channels often mean more oversight, not less.
Russia’s bill appears to move crypto into a more formal state-supervised framework.
That may help compliant firms, but it may also limit unlicensed activity. Exchanges and miners could face clearer obligations, and cross-border settlement may be restricted to approved participants.
For markets, the important signal is that crypto continues to move into formal legal systems.
The early era of ignoring or banning digital assets is giving way to more detailed frameworks. Some are investor-focused. Some are enforcement-focused. Some are designed around national payment strategy.
Russia’s legislation fits the third category especially closely.
The final details will matter, but the direction is clear: the State Duma is moving crypto regulation deeper into law, and the result could shape how mining, exchanges, and settlement operate in one of the world’s most geopolitically sensitive markets.
This article is based on Russian State Duma legislative materials.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released in official primary source disclosures at primary source documentation.
A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy.
According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University, one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex.
The largely unregulated advertising industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart—despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
© Tomas Ragina/Getty
Bitcoin Magazine
Russia Passes Landmark Crypto Law, Setting State-Run Rails for Sanctioned Trade
Russia’s State Duma passed a law on Tuesday that regulates the circulation of crypto and digital rights for the first time, a framework that sets rules for crypto exchanges, digital depositories, and investors while it opens a state-supervised channel for cross-border trade.
Lawmakers cleared bill No. 1194918-8, “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights,” in its second and third readings, the final stage in the chamber, according to semi-official Russian news agency Tass.
The measure heads to the Federation Council and to President Vladimir Putin for a signature, a process expected to take two more weeks before the law takes effect. It caps a sweeping regulatory push that has moved through parliament across the year.
The law does not turn bitcoin into money a Russian can spend at the store. The ruble stays the sole lawful currency for goods and services inside Russia, the ban on crypto payments holds, and a bar on advertising that promotes such use holds with it.
What the law does is grant crypto a legal identity and a set of gates. It recognizes digital assets as property, licenses the firms that handle them, lets investors buy within set limits, and clears crypto for use in foreign trade.
In plain terms, Russia is not freeing crypto for daily life; it is bringing crypto inside the state’s fence, where the government can watch it, tax it, and steer it toward the uses it wants.
Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the Duma Committee on Financial Markets, said the bill was “aimed at creating legal conditions for the functioning of cryptocurrencies in our country,” and that lawmakers had “maximally” weighed industry feedback.
From September 1, 2026, the Bank of Russia will license five categories of participant — exchanges, brokers, management companies, depositories, and exchangers — the spine of the new market.
Firms in a special registry may run exchange activity, with a grace period to July 1, 2027, before that requirement takes hold. Such firms must carry minimum capital of 15 million rubles, some $190,000, and must join a self-regulatory body.
The law defines exchange activity as the systematic purchase and sale of cryptocurrency for one’s own account outside organized trading, with “systematic” set at two or more deals in a month above 3.5 million rubles.
JUST IN:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) July 21, 2026
The commercial heart of the law sits in the cross-border carve-out. The framework legalizes what gray-market networks did in the shadows: settlement of foreign trade in crypto, outside the dollar-and-euro banking system that Western sanctions target. It hands the practice the Bank of Russia’s stamp.
The same function ran through venues such as Garantex, which U.S. law enforcement shut down in March 2025, and through the ruble-pegged A7A5 stablecoin, a token that has moved tens of billions in sanctions-linked flows and that the U.K. has named in a sanctions round.
Moscow has pitched crypto trade as a route around sanctions for years; the new law builds it into formal infrastructure.
The turn is a sharp one. In January 2022, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, the Bank of Russia proposed an outright ban on crypto transactions and mining, and cast digital assets as a threat to financial stability.
That stance held for as long as it took Western governments to cut Russian banks from SWIFT, a move that made trade in dollars and euros a harder task. Four years of infighting followed between a finance ministry that wanted crypto legal and a central bank that wanted it banned.
Putin signed an experimental law in August 2024 that permitted mining and international crypto payments; Tuesday’s bill is the permanent frame that replaces the trial.
For investors, the law splits the market in two. Non-qualified retail buyers may purchase up to 300,000 rubles of cryptocurrency, near $3,800, through a single licensed intermediary each year, and may send up to 100,000 rubles abroad.
Qualified investors face higher ceilings — up to 3 million rubles for purchases and 1 million rubles for foreign transfers. Both groups must pass a risk-awareness test, and qualified status can rest in part on prior crypto experience. Tax treatment is set to track the rules for securities, with rates to firm up as implementing regulations arrive. The tiered design follows earlier steps that opened bitcoin access to retail buyers.
The law leans on monitoring rather than disclosure of every wallet. Drafters dropped an earlier plan to require holders to reveal individual wallet addresses; reporting will center on transaction volumes and account balances.
Large transfers to foreign or third-party accounts face a 48-hour hold, a window for authorities to review funds before they clear.
Assets that clear strict thresholds may trade on organized venues — an average market cap above 5 trillion rubles over two years and average daily volume above 1 trillion rubles — limits expected to confine early trading to bitcoin and ether, with solana a possible third. Privacy coins that hide transaction data stay barred.
The main provisions take effect on September 1, 2026, with a transition period for existing operators that runs to March 1, 2027.
The passage marks another step in a run of Russian crypto moves, from a bid to make digital assets part of “everyday finance” to a crackdown on unregistered mining that carries the threat of forced labor.
This post Russia Passes Landmark Crypto Law, Setting State-Run Rails for Sanctioned Trade first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
Russia will likely come out of its war against Ukraine as a more dangerous military power than it was before the invasion began, despite losing equipment and troops at a scale no major military has suffered in a conventional war since World War II, according to an analysis by Jakub Janovsky published on Fronts.co. That […]Bitcoin Magazine
Russia Moves to Rein In Crypto Fraud With New Legislation
Russia is pushing ahead with regulating the cryptocurrency market, with the State Duma considering a bill on combating fraud in the industry, according to reports.
The bill will look at “combating the illegal use of cryptocurrencies within our country,” Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, reportedly said.
Lawmakers will vote on the bill in its second and third readings this week, according to Russia’s Tass news agency, and will also work to provide “an opportunity for those who use cryptocurrencies for international transactions to do so within the legal framework.”
Using crypto has been illegal in Russia as a form of payment since 2022 but lawmakers in the country have been open about using them for international settlements.
President Vladimir Putin has also previously spoken about mining digital assets, and admitted back in 2022 that the country had “certain competitive advantages” in the sector thanks to its surplus of energy and cold climate.
Last year, the president signed a law allowing cryptocurrency mining in the country, allowing legal entities to mine if they have been approved by the digital ministry. Foreign operations are currently banned from doing business in the country.
Back in 2023, the Russian legislature passed a bill legalizing the use of digital currency as a way to make international payments. The bill likely has helped the country skirt international sanctions: The U.S. and European governments sanctioned Russia when it annexed Crimea in 2014, and Western nations have stepped up penalties since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Top Russian banks are planning to launch crypto trading services when new regulations take hold in the country. Lawmakers have said that investors will have to pass a test to start crypto investing and will be limited on the amount they can buy.
BREAKING:
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) December 4, 2024
Russia has long had a complex history with regulating cryptocurrencies but Putin has previously praised Bitcoin.
While speaking at a forum in Moscow in December 2024, the leader of Russia was talking about the dominance of the dollar and other payment methods when he highlighted that new technologies were emerging that could help people move money.
“For example, Bitcoin, who can ban it? Nobody,” he said at the time. “And who can prohibit the use of other electronic payment instruments? Nobody, because these are new technologies.”
This post Russia Moves to Rein In Crypto Fraud With New Legislation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
Russian engineers have turned one of their most common military helicopters into a flying jammer built specifically to blind Ukraine’s long-range strike drones, Militarnyi reported, after a Russian propaganda Telegram channel accidentally revealed the previously unknown system in its own footage. The outlet identified the aircraft as a Mi-8, a twin-engine transport helicopter the Soviet […]A satellite photograph taken Sunday appears to confirm what Ukraine’s president claimed just two days earlier: a Russian strategic bomber sitting at Engels air base did not survive a recent drone strike. The open-source monitoring community AviVector published commercial satellite imagery from Planet Labs PBC, dated July 19, showing what the group identified as a […]Somewhere in a Russian drone factory, an engineer looked at a satellite-jamming crisis that has cost the Kremlin countless drones and countless rubles, and solved it with the same tool Boy Scouts use to find their way out of the woods. A Ukrainian radio technology specialist says Russia has started bolting a basic magnetic compass […]President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Friday that Ukraine’s Security Service, known as the SBU, destroyed a Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber at the military airfield in Engels, Russia, part of what he described as a new round of successful long-range strikes deep inside Russian territory. Zelenskyy made the announcement in a socail media, saying Ukrainian forces also […]One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning.
Clickfix has emerged as an effective attack technique that attackers, primarily financially motivated criminals, began using in the last year or so. Websites under the control of the attackers display a CAPTCHA that requires the visitor to copy a jumble of text and paste it into the terminal. The text contains scripts that, once entered, perform malicious actions, typically by installing malware or exfiltrating sensitive data. Ukraine’s CERT said Wednesday that Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit inside the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, is now using the technique.
The Clickfix attacks began in the spring and have continued through the summer. The campaign has resulted in the network compromise of at least one organization when a connected device was found to be infected by FreakyPoll, the name of one of Sandworm’s custom malware packages. Ukrainian authorities discovered 10 compromised websites that displayed a PowerShell command as part of a fake CAPTCHA that said it had to be passed to ensure a real human was behind the visiting device’s keyboard.
© Getty Images
Tell the Russian people about the carnage in Russia’s war with Ukraine. Tell them about the Russian lives lost and the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of a sovereign nation. Former President Ronald Reagan ensured that he got information into the former Soviet Union to truthfully speak to the people about their government’s lies about the cost – in lives and money – of their war in Afghanistan. After ten years, in 1989, the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the final chapter in the Cold War.
Russia’s Vladimi Putin seemingly doesn’t care about the Russian lives lost or the crushing financial cost of a five-year invasion of Ukraine. Over 1.4 million Russian casualties (killed, wounded, missing, or captured), and over 500,000 killed at a cost of over $500 billion. Are the people in Russia aware of the magnitude of this tragedy? Are they aware of Mr. Putin’s view that Ukraine has no right to exist and he is justified in invading a sovereign Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons for security assurances?
Indeed, Ukraine’s casualties are over 600,000, with close to 140,000 killed, including 16,000 civilians. The cost so far is close to $600 billion, with a price tag of $U.S. 1 trillion to reconstruct a devastated Ukraine. This is the price Ukraine is paying because of the Russian invasion and Mr. Putin’s goal of attempting to recreate the Russian empire.
President Donald Trump has reached out to Mr. Putin numerous times to secure a cease fire and an eventual peace treaty. To date, those efforts have been unsuccessful, but Mr. Trump persists, fortunately. But until we secure a cease fire, Ukraine needs the support of the U.S. and the European Union, for the weapons and missile defense systems needed for its survival.
Fortunately, the recent NATO Summit of 32 allied countries reaffirmed their strong support to Ukraine, pledging 70 billion Euros to Ukraine and giving Ukraine a green light to produce PATRIOT missile interceptors.
But the U.S. – and our NATO allies -- can do more to get the truth to the Russian people. The truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians killed in Ukraine and the bereaved families that are paying the ultimate price.
Although the United States Information Agency closed in October 1999, it transferred its important mission to the Department of State. And hopefully our colleagues at State are working hard to ensure that we are getting the message to the Russian people that the war must end; that they and the people in Ukraine have suffered enough. That Mr. Putin and his cronies need to explain why so many men and women died, in a war Mr. Putin created, as he enriches himself. A war that has made the Russian Federation a pariah state.
This should be a whole government mission: to disseminate primarily in Russia the truth about the hundreds of thousands of Russians (and Ukrainians) killed and maimed in a war created by an arrogant and inept Putin.
Although the audience for this important message is the Russian people, China should also be mindful of the tragedy of the war in Ukraine. Indeed, China is aligned with a Russian pariah state, heavily sanctioned by the international community. Is this the image China wants to share with the world?
The NATO Summit was clear in its support of Ukraine, the victim of a cruel and brutal Russian invasion. It’s time for the Russian government to listen to the Russian people and end this bloody war.
The author is the former associate director of national intelligence. All statement of fact, opinion or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.
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One week ago, three widely respected European news outlets published the results of an investigation into what they described as a "joint plan" by China and Russia to "defeat Elon Musk's Starlink."
The story was the product of a long-running inquiry by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. Reporters at those publications said they reviewed a cache of documents detailing growing military cooperation between China and Russia. The documents covered discussions between the nuclear powers on integrated air and missile defense systems, autonomous "swarm" loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation, the report said.
According to the papers, the investigation found evidence of a partnership between China and Russia in the field of space weapons far deeper than either country has acknowledged. One particular focus for China and Russia has been developing strategies to counter SpaceX's Starlink satellite broadband network.
© SpaceX
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