VISA and Mastercard in Russia

[gadje]

I didn't follow the news closely but I saw headlines on TV that VISA and MasterCard no longer work in Russia. What I saw was that cards issued abroad do not work in Russia, and cards issues in Russia do not work abroad.

Does anyone know if Russians have their own card networks? I mean does the average Vladimir have issues when taking money from ATM and using their cards to buy groceries? Are there other networkes that allow ATM and Debit cards to work?

What about American Express, Discover, do they have a presence in Russia?

Thanks

[Lux Interior]

Visa - It's (almost) everywhere you want to be!

[hal]

From extremely knowledgeable reporter Julia Ioffe

https://twitter.com/juliaioffe

Here's the thing about @Visa and @Mastercard leaving Russia: it only affects Visa/Mastercard transactions on cards from Russian banks *outside* Russia. These cards continue to work *in* Russia. This punishes Russians who fled the country, i.e., those who oppose Putin and the war.

Putin's cronies, like RT editor in chief Margarita Simonyan, will still be able to use their
@Visa and @Mastercard and access their funds, but the journalists of TVRain who fled bc they were threatened with 15 yr jail sentences for telling the truth *won't* be able to.

@Visa and @Mastercard what are you doing to solve this problem? Will you allow Putin's critics to access their own money so they can survive abroad, in safety, or will you continue to punish them while enabling people inside Russia?

[Tiangou]

Amex just suspended operations in Russia as well.

Yeah, it primarily affects those who make international payments.

The reason why is that payments within Russian borders use the "Mir" Russian credit card processing network run by their central bank. A law put into place right after the invasion of Crimea mandated that all domestic credit card transactions use this network.

More evidence that they've been planning this for a long time.

...International payments aren't being affected all that much either. A Chinese company is acting as middle-man.