A7 Leaks Expose $8B Crypto Pipeline Fueling Russia’s Shadow Politics - The Untold Story
Digital Shadows Reveal Kremlin's Secret Financial Arteries
The A7 document dump just pulled back the curtain on how modern geopolitical games are funded. Forget traditional banking systems—this is the new era of shadow finance.
How Crypto Moves Billions Unseen
Blockchain networks cut through sanctions like hot knives through butter. The $8 billion pipeline bypasses every conventional monitoring system, proving that decentralized tech operates in a realm where regulators can't follow.
Political Warfare Gets Digital Upgrade
Dark money now flows through channels that leave no paper trail—only cryptographic signatures. These leaks show how political operations fund themselves without touching the legacy financial system that's still trying to figure out what a blockchain actually is.
The irony? Traditional finance institutions spend millions on compliance while crypto moves eight billion dollars right under their noses. Some due diligence.
Welcome to the future of political finance—where the rules haven't been written yet, and the players are already winning.
How Shor built A7 into a sanctions-busting hub
Shor’s pivot to crypto was a strategic evolution born of necessity. After being convicted in 2017 for his role in the theft of $1 billion from Moldovan banks, he fled to Israel and later Russia, which granted him citizenship.
The United States sanctioned him in 2022 for his efforts to undermine Moldovan democracy. From this position as a sanctioned fugitive, Shor founded the A7 group in 2024, creating a formalized structure for the expertise he had cultivated.
According to Elliptic, the company is partially owned by Russia’s state-owned Promsvyazbank (PSB), a bank itself sanctioned for financing Russia’s defense industry, cementing A7’s role as a de facto arm of the state’s financial warfare apparatus.
The scale of that operation is staggering. In a speech to Vladimir Putin in early September, Shor boasted that A7 had facilitated 7.5 trillion rubles, equivalent to roughly $89 billion, in cross-border transactions for Russian businesses in just ten months.
While the mechanisms were opaque, the A7 leaks now provide the blueprint. They reveal a complex settlement scheme funneling payments through a network of companies, primarily in Kyrgyzstan, a country with close political and financial ties to Moscow.
The scheme blends traditional tools like cash and promissory notes with a heavy reliance on cryptocurrency, particularly Tether’s USDT, to MOVE value across borders outside the controlled traditional financial system.
A7 in action
This dependence on crypto is laid bare in internal chat logs where employees casually discuss multimillion-dollar USDT transfers for treasury management. In one exchange, a user named “athena1098” requests two million USDT for “treasury,” a transaction that alone identified a wallet with more than $677 million in flow. The leaks reveal that “athena1098” is Maria Albot, a sanctioned former Moldovan politician and close Shor ally, demonstrating how digital assets enable continued financial operations despite sanctions on individuals.
Recognizing the vulnerability of relying on a USDT stablecoin that could be frozen by its issuer, A7 developed its own alternative: A7A5, a ruble-backed stablecoin. With 41.6 billion tokens in circulation valued at nearly $500 million, A7A5 was engineered to be sanctions-proof.
Leaked chats from April 2025 show employees discussing a concerted market-making effort, with A7 wallets sending at least $2 billion in USDT to exchanges to buy A7A5 and build liquidity, creating a self-contained financial ecosystem insulated from Western pressure.
