Following Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, banks in Kazakhstan, the Kremlin’s key trading partner in the post-Soviet space, which is part of the CSTO and EAEU bloc, are massively refusing to service cards of the Russian Mir payment system. The Moscow Times writes about this.
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It is noted that the space of use of Russian Mir cards continues to decline rapidly after the United States imposed sanctions against the Russian payment system and threatened banks that ignore them with secondary measures.
Halyk Bank, the largest in Kazakhstan, has de facto joined the sanctions against the Mir system . It completely stopped servicing Russian cards, including transfers, payments through terminals and cash withdrawals from ATMs.
According to a bank representative, this happened in February, when the National Payment Card System (NSCP) came under US blocking sanctions. A 100% subsidiary of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, responsible for servicing and issuing Mera.
“Russian cards are also not serviced in ForteBank, Nurbank, Freedom Bank and CenterCredit Bank.” “You don't even have to try to find banks in Kazakhstan, these are not sanctions from us, this is the “World” card under sanctions for Kazakhstan,” said the CenterCredit call center.
A ForteBank representative said that transfers do not go through “due to for sanctions.”
Partially, only VTB Kazakhstan and Bereke bank (former Kazakh subsidiary of Sberbank) continue to work with Russian cards in Kazakhstan. At the same time, the former allows you to withdraw cash from Mera at ATMs only in the national currency is the tenge, and the second does not allow money transfers.