Every blocked illegal casino means money for the state budget

On October 27, Ukraine's telecom regulator NCEC (National Commission for the State Regulation of Electronic Communications) notified internet providers that they must block access to 798 websites of illegal casinos, following a decision by PlayCity, the state gambling regulator. Just over a week earlier, on October 16, another 468 resources were added to the list. In other words, in only two weeks the state sent more than 1,200 illegal platforms for blocking. This is a good signal: the state is not just recording the problem, it is removing it. According to the Ministry of Digital Transformation, it now takes just one day from the decision to the actual blocking.

Such blocking has become constant work. Illegal gambling does not keep office hours: one day a site is shut down, the next day its mirror appears under a new domain. That is why it matters that Ukraine already has a tracking system that automatically detects copies of blocked resources. The pressure on illegal operators has to be daily, because every day they look for loopholes to come back.

Why does this matter? Every illegal site that is shut down gives the state a chance to bring a player back to the legal segment. Of course, not everyone will come back at once: block access to one illegal site, and the player moves to a second; block the second, and he moves to a third. That is exactly why blocking has to be systematic: the fewer illegal alternatives there are, the greater the chance that the player will stay on a licensed site. And there he gets what an illegal operator will never offer: age verification, guaranteed payouts, limits and the option of self-exclusion. According to PlayCity, more than 3,000 people have used self-exclusion in 2026. Illegal casinos have no such button. There, the player is left alone with a casino that bears no responsibility to him and is not subject to Ukrainian law.

The other side of the issue is money. Illegal operators pay nothing in Ukraine. Licensed gambling operators do: according to PlayCity, the gambling industry contributed almost UAH 17 bn to the budget in 2025. These are not abstract figures in reports. In May, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced that the government had directed UAH 10.8 bn from the special fund to weapons and the development of the defense industry, and explicitly named licence fees from gambling and lotteries among the sources of these funds. So every hryvnia of the legal gambling business goes to the state budget and strengthens it, and, as we can see, part of these funds goes to defense.

Skeptics will say that blocking websites is like emptying the sea with a spoon, since, by various estimates, a significant part of the market is still in the shadows. True, blocking alone will not defeat the illegal market. But without it, the black segment would feel no pressure at all. The state is doing its part of the job. The other half is to make the legal market more convenient and more competitive than the black one: to cut off the payment schemes through which illegal operators take Ukrainians' money, and to finally adopt the comprehensive tax bill. Had it been passed, the legal business would already be paying more to the budget today.

My forecast: if the state keeps up the current pace of blocking and adds a strike on the payment channels of illegal operators, then by the end of 2027 revenues from the gambling industry will exceed the 2025 level. That is why consistency matters more than any single record.

Anton Kuchukhidze, Chairman of the Ukrainian Gambling Council, exclusively for Ukrainian News