Gambling addiction is a huge problem for soldiers who are defending Ukraine from the aggressor country. To distract themselves from the constant stress and exhaustion, soldiers are ready to spend tens of thousands of hryvnias, not realizing that the situation is getting out of control. Some players become so addicted to online gambling for money that they plunge into huge debts. And a fighter with debts in the amount of several zeros is an easy target for Russian recruiters. In this article, read about online casinos Slots City and Slot King, their alleged ties to Russia, and the dominance of advertising aimed at military personnel.
On April 15, 2024, a well-known Ukrainian activist, Sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Pavlo Petrychenko was killed in the battles against the Russian occupiers. Many famous people and President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed condolences for the loss. In addition to defending his homeland in the last days of his life, Pavlo actively raised the problem of total gambling addiction among soldiers on the front line. The deceased soldier’s petition to ban online casino gambling for the military gained the required number of votes in a matter of days, and Volodymyr Zelenskyi instructed the President to consider the issues raised in it.
Earlier, this topic was also raised by activist and soldier Yuriy Hudymenko. “A person with debts is the most amenable tool for recruitment. And if you think that only we use this tool, you are f*cking wrong. The Russians know about it as well as we do and use it hyperactively. And our debt fighter is just a gift for them. There will be no examples, but, unfortunately, not because they don’t exist. They do exist,” he said.
Civilians are also affected by the problem of gambling addiction. Especially those who found themselves on the brink of survival during the war and are trying to grab any opportunity to make money. Online casinos advertised by famous bloggers, Telegram channels, and even some media seem to be a straw for such vulnerable people to grab.
Slots City and Slot King are among those whose ads appear most intrusively in front of the eyes of people with mobile phones. Although these companies are not related to each other in any way, they are equally dangerous for gamblers.
Slots City and ties to Russia
The legal entity that received a license for Slots City online casino in February 2021 is GameDev LLC. As of March 2024, the founders of the company were Belfour Closed Joint Stock Company, a non-diversified venture corporate investment fund, and Israeli citizen Yaakov Finkelstein.
The company was founded in December 2019 by Maxim Kovtoniuk, and a year later he was joined by Ruslan Nonka. These names are important because they are used to register a number of other companies with gambling-related names. In particular, among them: “Gambletech, Statbet, Centergame, and Gameyug. With a high degree of probability, such a large number of companies registered to the same people may indicate that they act as legal entities for other online casinos that are essentially copies of Slots City, but do not have a license from the Gambling Regulatory Commission.
Ruslan Nonka remained among the founders of GameDev LLC until November 2023. Now the company is officially managed by Israeli Yaakov Finkelstein. The search for a person with this surname might not have yielded any results if it were not for his sister, Bella Semenivna Finkelstein, with whom he and another business partner own a vodka factory in Nemyriv, Vinnytsia region, known worldwide as the Nemiroff brand.
Until recently, Yakiv Finkelstein went by the surname Gribov and was a longtime member of the Forbes 100 richest people in Ukraine. In the pre-war year 2021, Yakov Gribov was ranked 83rd with a net worth estimated at $140 million.
Until about 2010, Nemiroff was one of the most promoted brands in Ukraine. For example, the vodka of this brand appeared in the video of the singer Ledy Gaga “Bad Romance”, the company was one of the main sponsors of title boxing fights and almost all championship arm wrestling matches were branded with Nemiroff symbols.
The company had factories in several countries, including Russia and Belarus. But it was Russia that caused the company to start crumbling. The original founders of Nemiroff were Yakov Gribov, Anatoly Kipish and Alexander Glus. In 2010, Gribov and Kipish almost reached an agreement with Rustam Tariko, a Russian businessman and owner of Russian Standard, to sell the company, but Alexander Glus was against the deal. The Russians were ready to pay $350 million for Nemiroff.
In 2013, Yakov Gribov openly called the Nemiroff brand “not Ukrainian”: “We managed to localize the place of distribution of this unauthorized product. Now it is one country – Ukraine. They cannot sell their products in other countries, because in other countries there are laws that require Nemiroff to be sold only through the legal owner of the trademark rights, Nemiroff Vodka Rus and NIPE. Our next step is to explain to suppliers and consumers, i.e. distributors and retail chains, that it is dangerous to sell Vinnytsia products.”
In an interview with Russian Forbes the same year, he was quite unequivocal in his view that Ukraine and Russia are fraternal nations:
“I have been and remain a supporter of close trade, economic and cultural ties between Russia and Ukraine. For Nemiroff, the benefits of the Customs Union are obvious. In my opinion, what is being discussed on the Maidan today is not the Russia-Ukraine-EU relationship, but the grievances against the current government that have accumulated among a large part of the population, and the energy of this dissatisfaction is precisely directed against friendly and mutually beneficial relations between Russia and Ukraine.”
Throughout the years of the conflict between Yakov Gribov and Oleksandr Glus, Nemiroff vodka was produced at Russian plants, first in Bashkiria and later in the Penza region. In fact, it is still being produced in the latter location today, despite the 10-year war that Russia has waged against Ukraine.
It was only in 2023 that the Ukrainian producer Nemiroff began to demand that the Russian company United Penza Vodka Plants (UDP) stop using the brand. As of now, the court proceedings are still ongoing, with the last hearing taking place in March 2024. According to the case file, the case is being considered in a closed session, so it is not yet possible to find out the details.
Last month, Russian media reported that a Russian company was considering producing alcoholic beverages under the Demiroff brand in order to allegedly avoid being associated with the Ukrainian one and thus settle the conflict. At the same time, experts do not rule out that Gribov, now called Finkelstein, and the Russians may have an agreement on this matter. “Renaming to Demiroff may be the result of an agreement between the parties…. In this case, a settlement agreement must be concluded and approved by the court,” says Russian lawyer Sergey Zuykov.
Nevertheless, while the trials are ongoing and Russia has been waging a full-scale war against Ukraine for three years, Nemiroff vodka can be easily bought in the stores of the occupying country. Here are some examples.
Why was Yakov Finkelstein’s personality described in such detail? So that the reader could understand that the intention to be friends with Russia did not leave his mind even in the third year of the full-scale invasion. That is why the fact that he now owns the Ukrainian online casino Slots City, although it is not his core business, plays perfectly into the hands of the Russians, who only see how to ruin Ukraine.
Slot King and loyalty to Russians
The story with the Ukrainian online casino Sloto King is a bit different. It has no direct connection with the occupying country. However, you can find information online that Russians can still play on this platform and even withdraw money in rubles.
The legal entity that obtained a gambling license for Slot King is Slots.com LLC. Its sole founder since September 2020 is Pavlo Zhurilo. He also manages another company – Option Time LLC, where his partner is Lilia Vakulchyk. The woman owns the most elite real estate in Kyiv, including an apartment and two garages in Novopecherski Lypky, two garages in the newly fashionable French Quarter residential complex, and two premises in another section of the same complex. The real estate in these complexes is among the most expensive not only in Kyiv but in Ukraine as a whole, and it is here that the so-called Ukrainian elite resides.
We also found out from specialized gambling websites that Slot King is “operated by Netgame Entertainment NV and is aimed mainly at players from Ukraine and Russia”. The latter company is registered on the Curacao Islands, which are controlled by the Netherlands. The registers show that NetGame Entertainment N.V. was founded in 2012. This is an important point, because in 2012, gambling was still prohibited in Ukraine.
The most recent reviews on Sloto King contain quite interesting information. One of them states that the casino has been operating since 2011, and the other – since 2014. It is difficult to say why the years of creation are different. But it does not matter, since in both cases, this work was illegal in Ukraine.
Even more information is offered by the Russian resource Casino.ru, where it is reported that “Sloto King online casino is designed for Russian-speaking users and positions itself as the first Ukrainian casino in hryvnia. Also, rubles and dollars are available for account management”.
So, even if the Ukrainian founders of Sloto King online casino have no direct connection to Russia, they should definitely explain how they could work in the online gaming industry during the period prohibited by law, and why they allow their platform to be used for withdrawals in Russian rubles.
When Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared the idea of legalizing gambling in Ukraine, including online casinos, he pursued a perfectly good idea – filling the budget. According to the calculations of the Slidstvo.info project, this business did show good revenues in 2023 – UAH 53 billion. But these amounts are many times different from how much Ukrainians spend on online and physical gambling. On an annualized basis, it is UAH 144-180 billion, which is more than twice the amount declared by official players in this area. If we remember that some of these funds are taken out of the pockets of Ukrainian military personnel, this is a complete disaster.
