Crimea’s residents have only two options when they want to buy something nowadays: cash or Pro-100.



Visa, MasterCard and all other recognised international payment systems stopped working after western sanctions were imposed in protest at Russia’s annexation of the peninsula last year, and Pro-100 – the first phase of Russia’s plan to launch its own domestic credit card system – has been introduced ahead of schedule in Crimea to fill the gap.

Pro-100 is the only way to get cash in Crimea. International money transfer systems have also pulled out of the region, and even people with Russian bank cards cannot make transfers or withdraw money in Crimea.

“A friend in the US needed to transfer me some money, and he had to send it by wire to another friend in Moscow, who withdrew the money and then found someone flying here from Moscow to bring it to me by hand,” said one exasperated resident.

The system is just one indication of how much the local population has had to adapt to the new reality, and offers a hint of what life could be like across Russia if western sanctions were to become even tougher.

“The Pro-100 project was introduced extra fast here,” said Oleg Saveliev, the Kremlin’s minister for Crimea, during an interview in Simferopol. “We are really hoping that our bankers and national bank are able to integrate the systems before the summer, so that tourists who come here with their usual cards are able to use them.”

While most Crimean residents remain positive about the Russian takeover, the illegality of the move in the eyes of most of the world has made life hard for them. Ukrainian banks have had to stop operations on the peninsula and no major Russian banks have moved in, fearing the international repercussions. This has left residents with a limited choice of banks, many with murky and unclear ownership structures.

Pro-100, pronounced “pro-sto” (which also means “easy”), was started as a project of Sberbank, the state-controlled giant that is Russia’s biggest bank. However, Sberbank has stayed out of Crimea, and many details about Pro-100 are unclear. The card system has a flashy website, but repeated calls to all the phone numbers listed on the site went unanswered over a period of two weeks. Occasionally, someone would pick up the phone and hang up immediately.

Analysts say that while there are plans to roll out the Pro-100 system across Russia eventually, the kind of fast-track expansion the authorities in Crimea are hoping for is unlikely.

“If there seemed to be a real chance of further sanctions and Visa and Mastercard ceasing to function, then they would move to activate this system more quickly, though of course it would be a card that only worked inside Russia,” said Maxim Osadchiy, an analyst at Bank BKF in Moscow. “But with things calming down over Ukraine, as well as the economic crisis that is prompting budget cuts, it’s completely unrealistic that this will happen on a broad scale within the next year.”

Salted vegetables for sale at the Central food market in Kerch. Photograph: Geodakyan Artyom/Itar-Tass/Corbis

For a few people in Crimea, the annexation had positive economic consequences, after Ukrainian banks beat a hasty withdrawal.

“The Russian authorities do not have access to the full Ukrainian property registers,” said one lawyer in Simferopol, who asked to remain anonymous. “So if you have the deeds to a property, you will automatically be reregistered as the owner under Russian law, and they would not know whether you had outstanding mortgage payments to a Ukrainian bank, for example.”

For most people, though, the banking turmoil has merely made life more difficult. The peninsula’s computer programming industry has mainly packed up and moved, and many Apple and Google applications have stopped working in the region. Ukrainian and other non-Russian mobile phones simply receive no signal on the peninsula, because of the sanctions.

As the war in eastern Ukraine appears to have ended its most vicious phase after a peace accord signed in Minsk last month, the prospect of even harsher sanctions has faded from the horizon. But the EU and the US do not appear close to lifting any of the current sanctions in the coming months.

Saveliev, who is himself on the EU sanctions list due to his role in Crimea, claimed the personal measures had not affected his life at all, and said he did not even know which lists he was on. He was angry, though, about the broader effect on the region.

“What amazes me most is the anti-humanitarian nature of the sanctions,” he said. “[The idea behind the sanctions is] ‘Let’s make it worse for them, let people die, but nobody should be able to invest in Crimea without being punished.’ The world has gone mad.”