> Visa Suspends All Russia Operations
https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
MasterCard/Visa cards issued in Russia will not work abroad, cards issued abroad will not work in Russia.
> MasterCard/Visa account for three-quarters of payments in Russia
https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/150023911662537932...
Edit: 25% might be false. Maybe 25% of cards are Mir-only? I'd appreciate if any Russian could chime in to clarify the percentages.
> we have decided to suspend our network services in Russia.
Besides, Russian banks are already promoting new cards - "Mir + UnionPay", where Union Pay is Chinese alternative to MC and Visa and it should be possible to use new Mir cards everywhere abroad where UnionPay is accepted.
"The suspensions announced on Saturday evening will prevent Mastercards and Visa cards issued by Russian banks from working in other countries and block people with cards issued elsewhere from purchasing goods and services from companies in Russia.
But other transactions may still go through. Cards branded with the Mastercard or Visa logo that were issued by Russian banks may still work inside the country, because the transactions are handled by a local processor, officials at both companies said."
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/05/world/russia-ukraine...
... And, as the cherry on top, ATM withdrawals have been blocked.
Presumably, this will all be figured out over the next week, but it's not great.
Yes. At least Tinkoff bank says so.
I'm more worried about GooglePay.
The only reason I did not bought Huawei last time was NFC+GooglePay.
It does feel coordinated. I know corporate law is kind of irrelevant in a context of war, but it feels more than ever like a cartel.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/paypal-shuts-down-its-servi...
This whole thread has been an eye opener for me, I had no idea so many people had so little idea of what 'economic sanctions' means.
Yes, yes it does feel coordinated. Have you noticed it came after sanctions were announced as well??
You don't need a cartel to coordinate. If someone shoots a gun and everyone ducks, their ducking was coordinated by the gunshot. They didn't need to get together and have a discussion to all duck together at the same time.
So it does nothing then. So russians will be able to use visa/mastercard within russia? They just won't be able to use it outside russia. And foreigners can't travel to russia and use visa/mastercard.
How many russians are going to travel to another country and use visa/mastercard in the near term? How many foreigners are going to travel to russia to use visa/mastercard in the near term? Now compare that to russians using visa/mastercard in russia. I'm guessing that's 99.99% of russians with visa/mastercard.
Just like with SWIFT "ban", it's all for show. The SWIFT ban doesn't affect russian banks tied to oil/gas trade. How convenient.
40%+ internal russian card payments are via their domestic "Mir" system, that is also available in a dozen or so foreign countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(payment_system)
MIR cards are often also co-branded with China's UnionPay, and UP is available everywhere Chinese tourists/business people travel, which is pretty much anywhere relevant enough.
If you want to travel to Russia, you just need to bring with you a UnionPay card, they are just as widely accepted as Visa in Russia, apparently.
I'm not sure what exactly this ban was even supposed to accomplish. Punish Russian citizens, who according to the West, don't even have free elections and therefore had no input whatsoever in this? Seems like an excellent way to win hearts and minds, I'm sure. /s
Key passage:
“ With this action, cards issued by Russian banks will no longer be supported by the Mastercard network. And, any Mastercard issued outside of the country will not work at Russian merchants or ATMs.”
I don’t believe it’s clear that cards issued in Russia are not still being accepted within Russia. Which is what I believe Visa is still doing:
“ all transactions initiated with Visa cards issued in Russia will no longer work outside the country and any Visa cards issued by financial institutions outside of Russia will no longer work within the Russian Federation.”
https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
If MasterCard is matching Visa it’s effectively cross border transactions that have stopped - not withdraw access to Russian issued cards within Russia.
If they have withdrawn access to Russian cards within Russia it’s going to put enormous pressure on Russian citizens. Visa and Mastercard apparently have 73% of the credit card market in Russia. This could be the type of pressure need for citizens to push back at the Russian administration (not that they aren’t already).
Meanwhile, for The Real Russians, business as usual.
This looks like theatre hurting the wrong people.
People at different levels of society are, of course, affected differently, but everybody's affected at this point. Even for an aristocrat, drinking moonshine in Krasnodar just doesn't have the same caché as Don Perignon in Paris.
Stephen Kotkin warned in a recent interview that the russians have their own way they can wreck havoc in our economies, like cutting undersea cables. And I also wonder if at one point the loss of revenues from cutting gas to europe will be worth given the economic impact it will inflict on the west (power cuts/lack of heating all over europe, price of gas sky-rocketting, etc).
At this point I’m wondering whether Russia knows it and wants to impose any sanction except cutting the gas.
On an completely unrelated note I'm sad to observe how corporate speech alters the language. I'm sure it's called "will be rejected" not "will no longer be supported".
I have an ancient smartphone that's "no longer supported" and it still works. I'm sure the message meant that Russian cards won't, but I guess as people got routinely scared to use anything but the vaguest terms it became a habit.
So all local payments will work, but no abroad payments (and no foreign cards to pay locally in Russia). Probably, I will lost most of my cloud data and compute resources incl. VPNs. Fortunately, some providers do accept SWIFT payments.
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/punk6529/status/14944446246304030...
But we are testing modern finance by weaponising the financial system. The most problematic move I think has been freezing the central bank's reserve. It might achieve the short term gain of hurting Russia, but what about the long term impact on the trust in holding foreign currencies?
But wait you say, those are bad people, and I’m a good person, I have nothing to fear! Good luck with that.
Edit: It didn’t take long for a good person with nothing to fear to assure us of his status.
There are very few gray areas about what they are doing in Ukraine, so everyone is firing with everything they've got. Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction someone called them.
When you typed this out, did it not occur to you that this feels this way to you due to a self-imposed bubble?
How is it easy? Does your country's dictator regularly invade neighbors without so much as pretext and targets civilians?
The key is that they tend to not invade European neighbours. So, yes, if you upset Europe, and all your transactions rely on European cooperation, you may no longer be able to transact.
In fact, if you upset Europe enough, and are not a nuclear state, you might even get invaded as a result. Your concerns about international financial transactions will be a bit academic at that point.
If anything, this episode should make you more confident about transactions just working. The point at which they stop working is 'We've done everything we could against you, short of declaring war.'
Now it's pretty clear how crypto can have a use case (as some of us already knew and were hammering on about it for a long time).
So can we set a new baseline here, and agree that crypto has a use-case? Or are you anti-crypto people still as short sighted as before?
I think we made some progress here on HN, and some of the "anti-crypto" people are now moving into "not pro crypto" space.
Evading sanctions is just another type of illegal trade.
I am absolutely sure that Transferwise is still available for Russians to use, so the freedom to transact isn't really lost. 'Cryptocurrencies' should not be used at all.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/payments-company-wise-sus...
Why not? Are you allergic to them or something? Why can't someone transfer money using crypto if it benefits them to do so?
It’s troubling, but hardly without precedent. Imagine if they had social media in the 30s-40s.
I have thought about this, and given the amount of pro-Fascist sentiment in Western Europe, WWII probably wouldn't have happened. Germany would probably have gotten away with taking Austria, Czechoslovakia, possibly the lands forfeited to France after WWI and at least part of Poland.
The world would look VERY different to today. Assuming Japan stuck to their neck of the woods, the USA probably would never have gotten to be a super power (given it was WWII that really catapulted them into that category). The UK may still have reasonable parts of the empire. The super powers would probably be Germany, USSR and a lesser extent, UK, Japan.
This is the stuff of alt-historical fiction.
EDIT: apologies for straying off topic but I couldn't resist.
Wouldn't it be just easier to fix our institutions so that we can trust and rely on them?
The crypto economy for example is full of sharks. It's a bigger, insider, scammer dog eats smaller, outsider, bagholder dog world and there is no fixing it. It's a zero sum game. It's unsustainable. It's inhumane. It's too simple to hold up any practical economy at scale.
Imagine there's one big bully in a schoolyard playground, alongside the one kid who is singled out. All the other kids (freely) choose to follow the bullies' lead and, at the very best, join in by ostracizing the victim. Who is in the wrong in that scenario?
The best thing Russian people can do is render Putin the king of an empty kingdom, and that was always the solution. Sure, there are hundreds of thousands, to millions and tens of millions of people (depending on where the poverty line is in Russia) for who that isn't an option. Equally so, those people wouldn't have been able to lift Putin's empire into what it is today. There would rather be no expertise for nukes, nobody to architect oil pipelines, and a terribly demoralized and disloyal army. Russia is has aspects of a developed country because of the fantastic people that live there.
Stop paying taxes to dictators, narcissists, and megalomaniacs.
We should widely open borders to Russian refugees and defectors. Patriotism is the love of a country, not a dictator.
I get why it’s done but it’s still sad to see people that have nothing to do with this situation get hit like this
So, in Russia all the cards will work, nothing is changed here (despite the statements of Visa and Mastercard). Cards issued by Russian banks would stop work abroad. The same is true for any foreign cards in Russia. So, foreigners in Russia are fucked. People who left Russia in a hurry because they didn't want to be part of this craziness or because it's dangerous for them to stay (i.e. they are known protesters against the regime) are fucked.
Nice move. Simply genius.
After first sanctions due to Crimean & Donbass conflict started rolling out in 2014, Russian gvt saw the writing on the wall and gradually strong-armed Visa & MC to move all the local transaction processing to НСПК (National System for Payment Cards).
Here's some more info on this (you can use Google Translate):
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE...
ALWAYS carry and travel with cash, no matter what.
ALWAYS keep enough cash hidden in your home to cover a month or more of expenses.
Funny, that's the exact opposite of the advice I hear to only travel with only petty-cash and rely on cards instead, so if you're mugged/robbed or simply misplace your wallet you won't be SOL far from home.
How one should pay for VPN or VPS, for example
I'm not against inconveniences per se. But this just doesn't really make sense. It's an inconvenience for a small minority of Russians outside the country and foreigners inside. But I don't understand what the main objective that was achieved here (except the beautiful press release).
I'd understand if they blocked all Russian cards, but it's technically impossible, and this measure looks like a PR move without any real meaning behind it.
It doesn't achieve that. Their economy is only cut off from the west. China, for example, still is find to trade with them. The west is still buying their oil too.
Ultimately the legitimacy of these sanctions come down to how effective they will be in influencing a favorable outcome - ie. pressuring Putin to end the war. Unfortunately Russia is not a democracy - it's a country where you get arrested for protesting, and practically a dictatorship where Putin has been running the country for the last 20+ years. Thus I'm not sure how effective these blanket sanctions will be in changing things, and Putin has so far showed no signs of backing down. But I sure hope I'm wrong. This invasion is completely unjustified, and Putin must be stopped (without escalating to WWIII).
Sanctions have nothing to do beliefs about the presence or support for democracy.
> Thus they think that actions like this will cause popular discontent with Putin.
No, the West believes that the sanctions limit the productive capacity of the Russian economy, and thereby Putin’s capacity to maintain and expand the war, constraining his practical options
(They also think that targeted sanctions on oligarchs put pressure on their support of the regime, which may alter Putin’s choices and prospects, but that even more clearly has nothing to do with democracy.)
Unless you're Russian I guess.
As much as I enjoy the act this could backfire as a show of the tremendous power these companies have: shutting down credit card payments will likely impact large portions of online payments.
But at the same time every extra inefficiency in the Russian economy could translate into less bullets going to kill Ukrainians
I can't think of a way to reply to this without being trite or insulting, but genuinely, what do you think is the point of a sanction?
But the, maybe obvious to you not to me, consequence is that this could shutdown the entire online marketplace in Russia (at least in the short term)
Also I'm not sure I'd call it a sanction since it's coming from a private company, not a government.
If I were any country right now I'd also take it as a warning to not depend on Mastercard or Visa given the immense power they hold
Even swift works with any other russian bank.
they're not.
they do what they're told.
Maybe they were forced. In any case, it really sucks.
That's one way to shoot your own foot Visa/MC.
I, for one, welcome this, less dependence on Visa/MC, the better.
I suppose I'm trying to say - the payment providers see where the cash is going, but not what you are getting in return. Without that visibility it's hard to more selectively ban transactions.
Russia isn't a democracy. Ordinary people can't oust Putin because the rest of the world makes their lives difficult. This doesn't fix the problem.
Punishing his existing subjects because he's invading another country to acquire more subjects is despicable.
And yet your argument is that, in an adjacent territory he already controls, the citizens should somehow be more successful at removing him?
In what possible way??
Either he is not a dictator and the people of Ukraine shouldn't worry because they'll just be able to "get rid of him" anyway, or he is a dictator and blaming Russian civilians for being under his dictatorial control is victim-blaming.
This doesn't work both ways.
Moreover, many people are in a grey area of the economy, paying no taxes at all: for example software developers making software for the West.
Looking at the ridiculous "sanctions" of recent days, I cannot say who they are directed against. In long run, they benefit Russia, preventing leaking of brains and capital.
It's European and American money that supports war crimes.
The biggest mistake Putin made is that he was under impression that Russia can survive alone and isolated. That might be possible in 60s but not any more.
World: No we don't.
Russia: Don't lie, you hate me!
World: Again, no.
Russia: punches world in the face
World: We hate you.
Russia: See, I told you!
Even if he pulls out of Ukraine tomorrow he will have succeeded in destroying any chance Russia ever had of joining the West, which I’m becoming convinced has always been a key aim of this enterprise.
But he can blame the West for all of it now and roll Russia back to being a complete autocracy where citizens have no rights or freedoms at all because Ukraine.
This logic led to embracing China in the hope that it will make them grow more liberal and democratic. Instead it led to US media/sports/gaming industry/etc kowtowing to China and apologizing to them in Mandarin.
The only solution is to contain the totalitarian world.
> Even if he pulls out of Ukraine tomorrow he will have succeeded in destroying any chance Russia ever had of joining the West
This is Russia's doing. We are only reacting. It's beyond ridiculous to blame the west when Putin is invading a free country and threatening us with nukes.
So, for example, previously locals employed by companies that valiantly declared their condemnation of Putin by shutting down their Russian offices had three choices: work for a company that does support Putin, leave, or starve. Now it’s just work for a Putin supporter or starve.
(Not entirely true because at least some of those companies put their employees on paid leave for now, but that’s still probably what it will ultimately boil down to in the relatively near future. Passenger planes being arrested in foreign airports because of sudden lease termination make for a similar one-two punch combo together with Putin’s closure of the land border in 2020: it’s getting very hard—and expensive—to physically leave even if you don’t want anything to do with this [15-year jail sentence] and never did.)
Good job..?
If I were more of a conspiracy type, I'd say they and Putin are on the same side now.
Is MasterCard is bombing civilians?
There's no guarantee that what replaces Putin is going to be more Western and not reactionary. For every Russian that is cosmopolitan and globalist, there's a dozen Russians in small villages that are True Believers and will see this foreign pressure for what it is: replacing a Russian president that, at least in their mind, they put there.
Even if you assume that it's going to be a democratic and Western government that rises from the ashes, I think the timescale for this is in years, not months, and I think that the impact on the average citizen in The West is going to be massive while we wait that out.
I paid north of $80 last night for 18 gallons of fuel, and it's only going to get worse. In Europe, they're staring down the barrel of a significant energy crisis next winter. Energy is everything: it's fertilizer and it's heat. And this is all on the tail of record inflation and a shaky economy.
Hot take: I think this is going to backfire and we're going to see destabilization in Europe and America before Putin is ousted. War tends to be a boon for the economy in the West, but I see good reason why this time could be different.
If you start running new propaganda - they will start believing it.
And you don't need a western-oriented government in russia. All that is needed is to remove one psycho, after that things will mostly go back to normal after russia compensates all damages and returns all territories.
Russia has been caught out by these sanctions, but China looks to have prepared very well with much of its own sovereign digital and financial infrastructure.
That's probable, but it's not "backfiring". It's a risk taken in order to stand up to a war criminal. He got away with it lightly last times ( Georgia, Crimea), a line had to be drawn, finally, or he'd simply never stop. Most Europeans are aware of the risks, and many support taking them now, because a line was crossed ( the donation drives, manifestations of support, rearmament plans, polls, etc. - it seems most Europeans support Ukraine and want their governments to act on that). If anything, i think this will bring Europe together, finally end up creating better military cooperation and coordination.
And it's always a game. Europe is staring down the barrel of an energy crisis, but Russia is staring down the barrel of economic ruin. Let's see how stable Putin's regime is with lack of everything bar basic foodstuffs ( furniture, electronics, vehicles, internet).
There's a reason we tolerated the Saudi bombing Yemen.
I think it's remarkable how little the markets reacted to this momentous event. Maybe it's not going to be as bad as rumored?
Who is assuming that's what is going to happen?
This might not topple Putin, but it would bankrupt Russia in the next 3 months.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30512981
Please try use Paypal with a VPN or in another country, Moneygram, Western Union or use cash, better yet use Transferwise (Wise) or buy gift cards to get your money out.
But if you're holding crypto today, what's the motivation to exit and assume a large ruble position?
But crypto is not immune from censorship, just from centralized censorship. If bitcoin was widespread now, users would block addresses or wholesale fork the chain to oust russia
Crypto is always used for speculation and nothing else and it cannot be used as a 'currency'. The slow speeds, the high gas fees, scams and rampant rugpulls and hacks make this an unregulated wild west that even the crypto exchanges have blocked Russian users (so much for no censorship) [0] so it is all broken to begin with.
'Cryptocurrenies' are not currencies and they should be called for what they really are: monopoly money tokens.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/crypto-exchange-bin...
Your keys, your coins. Their keys, their coins.
Anyone who is paying attention, globally, is now realizing that they need to begin moving at least some assets into cryptocurrencies, in their own, personal accounts.
The problem is: BIP-39 is a train-wreck, from any practical security and reliability perspective. Basically, any "normal" person setting up a Crypto account w/ BIP-39 seed recovery is just gonna lose their money. I estimate 10% a year probability of total account loss: probably greater.
Use SLIP-39: https://slip39.kundert.ca/macos. Set up an account. Fund it. Get this done.
Because: you're next...
