Kyrgyzstan's Elkart Interbank Processing Center said on April 2 that the Central Asian country's banks will stop processing transactions with Russian Mir payment cards as of April 5 due to Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine. Last week, another former Soviet republic, Armenia, announced a similar move. In September 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department threatened foreign banks with secondary sanctions for servicing Mir cards, a Russian card-payment system. Earlier, some banks in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam, as well as Samsung Pay and Apple Pay systems, stopped working with Mir cards.
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