Ukraine blocked over 4,500 online casinos during 2024, according to the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.
In the ministry’s Thursday press release, it said the effort was in response to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s directive to restrict gambling in Ukraine.
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The ministry has reached out to Apple and Google requesting them to block gambling applications, and it established a fast-track process with Apple to facilitate the process, the press release says.
However, the applications only make up a tiny fraction of the more than 4,500 casinos blocked, with just 92 from Apple’s AppStore and 26 on Google’s Play Market. A further 4,460 online casinos removed by Ukraine’s State Special Communications Service, are websites accessed through other routes according to the press release.
While gambling in Ukraine was legalized in 2020, illegal online casinos became an issue in the country even before Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, with concern that the problem has been exacerbated by the ongoing war.
In September 2021, Ukraine’s State Fiscal Service (SFS) announced it had uncovered an illegal online casino employing 60 people with an annual turnover of more than $30 million.
Following the 2022 invasion, gambling addiction among the military also became an issue - a phenomenon that a military psychologist described as a stress relief coping mechanism in an in-depth Kyiv Post investigation on the topic in April 2024.
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In April 2024, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) estimated the annual turnover of gambling in online casinos to be around Hr.150 billion ($3.8 billion) or more than Hr.400 million ($10.1 million) a day.
By comparison, the total value of donations to the AFU in 2023 was around Hr.46 billion ($1.2 billion) - a third of that spent on gambling.
In addition, financial burdens brought on by gambling debts – especially as some illegal online casinos are based in Russia – increase the risks of soldiers becoming a target for subversion by Moscow’s security services, sources told Kyiv Post at the time.
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