Russia adds Moscow to crypto mining ban list starting Aug. 15, 2026
Resolution No. 936 extends restrictions through Dec. 31, 2032 and also adds parts of Kursk Region on power-supply grounds.
Russia expanded its cryptocurrency mining ban to include Moscow, the Moscow Region, and several territories in Kursk Region. The restrictions start Aug. 15, 2026 and are scheduled to run through Dec. 31, 2032, citing electricity supply concerns.
Russia’s mining ban expands to Moscow through 2032 under Resolution No. 936
Russia’s government has added Moscow and the Moscow Region to its list of areas where cryptocurrency mining is restricted, with the new limits scheduled to begin Aug. 15, 2026 and run through Dec. 31, 2032.
The change is formalized in Resolution No. 936, signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on July 25, 2026. The resolution amends an earlier mining restriction order issued in December 2024, with records referenced as published on Pravo.ru.
The updated restricted-area list also adds several territories in Kursk Region. The text specifies eight municipal districts and the city of Lgov, signaling that the policy is being applied with municipal-level granularity rather than a single blanket regional designation.
Power-supply rationale and the data-center footprint in the Moscow region
The official framing is electricity supply. The expansion is described as extending existing restrictions in areas facing power-supply constraints, positioning the move as grid management rather than a direct attempt to intervene in crypto markets.
That distinction matters for how traders should model the next steps. Energy-driven policy tends to tighten around peak-demand windows and infrastructure bottlenecks, not token price cycles. It also means the enforcement surface is likely to be operational: load, metering, and where power is actually being drawn.
The Moscow Region’s Energy Ministry has already put numbers on the local compute footprint. It estimated Moscow and the Moscow Region have 65 data centers connected to the power grid with combined capacity of 734 MW, including 19 data centers in the Moscow Region with 233 MW of capacity, per figures cited via TASS.
Those figures raise a practical question the resolution text does not answer: how authorities distinguish “mining” from other high-density workloads inside grid-connected facilities. If compliance is written narrowly, the impact concentrates on dedicated mining sites. If it is enforced through power-use patterns or tenant screening, the spillover risk shifts to hosting desks and data-center operators that have historically treated mining as just another customer segment.
The Kursk additions reinforce the same theme. Naming eight municipal districts plus Lgov implies a patchwork map where operators can be compliant in one district and non-compliant a few kilometers away, which tends to push relocation decisions toward clearer jurisdictions rather than marginal edge cases.
Aug. 15 implementation: what miners and hosting desks should monitor next
The first catalyst is clarifying guidance ahead of Aug. 15, 2026. The current text does not specify whether the ban targets industrial-scale mining only, includes home mining, or extends to hosted mining inside data centers, and it does not outline exemptions, monitoring, or penalties.
The second catalyst is enforcement behavior after the start date. Inspections or compliance actions tied to Moscow and the Moscow Region’s data-center footprint would be the cleanest proxy for how strict the policy is in practice, especially given the 734 MW grid-connected capacity cited by the regional energy ministry.
The third catalyst is relocation flow. A ban that runs through Dec. 31, 2032 is long enough to force multi-year hosting and capex planning, which can shift hashrate and hosting demand toward Russian regions not on the restricted list or across borders. The earlier framework already included time-bounded restrictions elsewhere, including parts of Buryatia and Zabaykalsky Krai, where a ban was set to run from April 1, 2026 through March 15, 2031.
The last watchpoint is policy drift. Resolution No. 936 is an amendment to the December 2024 restriction framework, which keeps the door open to further additions or timeline changes if power-demand pressure persists.
My take: this is an energy-management move that can still reshuffle where compute sits
The threshold that matters is not the headline geography. It is the duration. Aug. 15, 2026 through Dec. 31, 2032 turns “restricted areas” into a planning constraint for anyone tied to the capital’s grid, and Moscow is not a trivial node when the region itself is citing 65 grid-connected data centers and 734 MW of capacity.
If the implementing guidance draws a clean line around industrial mining, the impact stays contained and looks like load-shedding policy. If enforcement bleeds into hosted mining inside data centers, the setup becomes structural for hosting supply and where Russian compute can legally sit for the rest of the decade.
