In September 2025, at Russia’s Far Eastern Economic Forum — a showcase for the Kremlin’s pivot toward Asia — a Moldovan fugitive named Ilan Shor took to the stage and made a remarkable claim: his financial platform, A7, had facilitated over 7 trillion rubles ($86 billion) in transactions in less than a year of operation.
If accurate, the figure would make A7 one of the most significant financial channels operating outside the Western banking system — a parallel payment infrastructure built explicitly to circumvent international sanctions. That it was designed, owned, and operated by a man convicted of orchestrating a billion-dollar bank fraud in Moldova makes the arrangement all the more extraordinary.
This investigation traces the architecture of A7, its connections to Russia’s sanctioned military banking sector, its expansion into cryptocurrency, and the political interference operations it has allegedly funded.
The Architect: Ilan Shor’s Journey From Moldovan Banking Fraud to Kremlin Utility
Ilan Shor’s career trajectory defies conventional logic. In 2014, he was convicted by a Moldovan court for fraud and money laundering in connection with one of the largest banking scandals in post-Soviet history — a scheme in which approximately $1 billion was siphoned from several Moldovan banks through a network of foreign shell companies. The theft amounted to roughly 12% of Moldova’s GDP.
Rather than serving his sentence, Shor fled, eventually surfacing in Russia, where he reinvented himself as a financial infrastructure entrepreneur. His proposition to the Kremlin was straightforward: build a payment system that allows Russian businesses and state entities to conduct international transactions without relying on Western-controlled financial networks — SWIFT, correspondent banking relationships, and dollar-denominated clearing systems that form the backbone of international sanctions enforcement.
The Platform: A7 and Promsvyazbank
A7 was officially launched in October 2024 by Promsvyazbank (PSB), a heavily sanctioned Russian state-owned bank that serves as the primary financial institution for Russia’s defense sector. PSB described A7 as a “unique settlement mechanism” designed to support Russian participants in foreign economic activity under sanctions pressure.
The partnership between a sanctioned military bank and a convicted financial criminal represents a convergence of necessity and opportunity. PSB needed channels that could operate outside Western oversight; Shor had experience constructing exactly those kinds of opaque financial networks.
A7’s operational model is built around intermediary structures that allow Russian entities to settle payments with foreign counterparts without direct exposure to sanctioned banking channels. By routing transactions through third-country entities and using non-dollar denominations, the platform creates a layer of separation between Russian buyers and their international suppliers — a layer specifically designed to frustrate sanctions monitoring.
The Crypto Extension: A7A5
Perhaps the most innovative — and concerning — element of Shor’s operation is A7A5, a stablecoin issued through a Kyrgyz company called Old Vector LLC. Each unit of A7A5 is claimed to be backed 1:1 by ruble deposits held in PSB accounts, effectively creating a cryptocurrency bridge between Russia’s sanctioned banking system and the global digital asset ecosystem.
The numbers are staggering. According to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, wallets controlled by A7 and associated businesses have received $8 billion in stablecoin transactions. The total value of all A7A5 transactions to date reportedly reaches $68 billion — a figure that, if verified, would make it one of the largest state-linked cryptocurrency operations ever documented.
The use of Kyrgyzstan as the issuance jurisdiction is deliberate. Central Asian countries have become critical nodes in Russia’s sanctions evasion infrastructure, offering relatively permissive regulatory environments, geographic proximity to Russia, and limited integration with Western compliance systems.
Sanctions Response: Too Little, Too Late?
The Western response to A7 has been slow relative to the platform’s growth. The United States sanctioned A7 in August 2025 — nearly a year after its launch and after billions in transactions had already been processed. The European Union followed in October 2025, designating A7A5, A7, and related entities, describing the cryptocurrency as “a prominent tool for financing activities supporting Russia’s war of aggression.”
But the sanctions designations face a fundamental challenge: A7 was built specifically to operate outside the systems that sanctions target. Sanctioning a platform designed to evade sanctions creates a recursive problem — the enforcement mechanism and the evasion mechanism exist in different domains.
Political Interference: Beyond Financial Infrastructure
The A7 story extends beyond sanctions evasion. Leaked documents analyzed by multiple investigative outlets indicate that Shor and his companies have been funding political and election interference campaigns in Moldova, with references to links to the Kremlin and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
This dual-use application — financial infrastructure for sanctions evasion coupled with political interference funding — suggests that A7 serves as more than a commercial venture. It functions as a strategic tool of the Russian state, providing both economic resilience against Western pressure and covert channels for influence operations in neighboring countries.
The implications extend to any country in Russia’s geopolitical orbit. If a single platform can simultaneously process $86 billion in sanctions-evading trade and fund foreign election interference, the convergence of financial and political warfare represents a qualitative escalation in the tools available to Moscow.
The Structural Question
A7’s existence poses a fundamental question about the future of sanctions as a geopolitical tool. The platform demonstrates that with sufficient motivation, technical capacity, and jurisdictional arbitrage, a state actor can construct parallel financial infrastructure at scale — infrastructure that processes volumes comparable to mid-sized national banking systems.
That the architect of this infrastructure is a convicted fraudster operating with the explicit backing of a sanctioned state military bank suggests that Russia’s approach to sanctions evasion has moved from ad hoc workarounds to institutional, industrial-scale solutions. The question for Western policymakers is whether enforcement can adapt at the same pace.
Sources: RFE/RL — The Fugitive Oligarch, The Cryptocurrency, And A Kremlin-Blessed Scheme | Lawfare — To Evade Sanctions, the Kremlin Turns to a Convicted Money Launderer | Centre for Information Resilience — A7 Abroad | Elliptic — A7 Leaks: Crypto in Russian Sanctions Evasion