Putin has authorized casinos in yet another region of the Russian Federation
Russia plans to open a sixth casino zone—Vladimir Putin signed the relevant law amid a record budget deficit, which is to be partially offset by taxes on gambling.
This was reported on May 2 by Russian Telegram channels.
According to the document published on the legal information portal, casinos will appear in the Altai Republic in addition to the existing gaming zones in Crimea, the Kaliningrad region, as well as in the Altai, Krasnodar, and Primorsky Krais.
The new casinos will be located at the Manzherok ski resort, which is owned by Sberbank (and overseen by the bank’s CEO, German Gref). The initiative to open a gaming zone in Altai was put forward by the Ministry of Finance late last year, citing that casinos would help the region’s development and create jobs.
Earlier this year, the Ministry of Finance proposed the widespread legalization of gambling to help the budget: last year, the federal treasury ran a deficit of 5.6 trillion rubles (five times more than the initial plan), while the “hole” in regional budgets reached a record high of 1.5 trillion rubles.
The head of the ministry, Anton Siluanov, proposed to Putin that the ban on online casinos be lifted, a Unified Betting Accounting Center be created similar to bookmaking offices, and a tax of at least 30% of revenue be imposed on such organizations. As a result, according to the Ministry of Finance’s estimates, the federal budget could receive 100 billion rubles annually.
The Altai Republic is one of the poorest Russian regions, where 13.8% of the population lives below the subsistence level.
As a reminder, the regulator PlayCity decided to revoke the license of the online casino Cosmolot due to the use of P2P payments, which violates gambling legislation.
As a reminder, a year ago, a law came into force in Ukraine that launched the reform of the gambling and lottery market. The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine took charge of coordinating the changes, and the state agency PlayCity was established to implement the reform. Currently, the agency has summarized the first results of its work one year after the reform’s launch.
The documents are currently under public review. We expect the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to consider them this year.
PlayCity has issued a license to the Ukrainian National Lottery.
In 2025, PlayCity blocked over 2,500 illegal online casinos, according to Fedorov.
Here’s a reminder of when online monitoring of the gambling industry will launch in Ukraine and how it will work.
Until then, the market will continue to operate under the old schemes, where payouts are widely disguised as “deposit refunds,” the TSK reported.
