Foreign Exchange Control in 2026: Foreign Accounts, Contract Registration, and Performance of Obligations

When a Genuine Contract Becomes a Foreign Exchange Control Risk

In 2026, a dispute involving a Russian company that made payments under two foreign trade agreements through an account in Kazakhstan reached the Commercial Court of the Moscow District. One agreement was for exports and the other for imports. Under the export contract, funds were credited to the Russian company's foreign account; under the import contract, payments to the foreign supplier were made from that account.

The agreements themselves were genuine, and the money did not disappear anywhere. The problem was different: both contracts reached the amount at which they had to be registered with a Russian authorized bank, but the company did not do so.

The tax inspectorate treated such transactions as unlawful currency transactions and initially imposed a fine of almost 19.9 million rubles - 30 percent of the total amount of transactions under the two agreements. The court reduced the fine to 13.27 million rubles but upheld the legal characterization of the violation. On 9 September 2026, the cassation court agreed. Garant

This example clearly shows why a discussion of foreign exchange control today cannot end with the words: "the mandatory sale of foreign currency has been abolished."

Yes, exporters are currently not required to sell a prescribed share of their foreign currency proceeds. But exporters still have quite a few other obligations. And the most expensive mistakes occur precisely where a business treats the payments as routine and fails to notice that, from the bank's perspective, the transaction also has a foreign exchange control dimension.

A company may receive funds into an account abroad. It may accept payment from another person. It may discharge a debt by set-off. All of these options occur in ordinary business. The question arises later: how exactly should a particular transaction be documented, and what should the Russian bank know about it?

Several different rules are often conflated here.

Zero Mandatory Sale Is Only One Part of the Regime

Accordingly, as of 30 September 2026, among the public instruments reviewed for this article there is no non-zero mandatory sale ratio for export foreign currency proceeds.

But that answers only the question of how much foreign currency must be sold.

A completely different question is what happens to the foreign buyer's obligation to the Russian seller and how performance of that obligation is reflected in the bank's records.

Currency legislation uses the term "repatriation" for this. Stripped of legal terminology, it is about monitoring whether the Russian foreign trade participant received the performance due to it and what happened to the non-resident's debt.

In this article, by "resident" I primarily mean a Russian company or individual entrepreneur, and by "non-resident" I mean a foreign counterparty. These are terms used in currency legislation. They should not be confused with tax residency.

The old repatriation model has indeed changed substantially. Presidential Decree No. 529 established that, in the foreign trade activities of Russian legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, Parts 1 and 2 of Article 19 of Federal Law No. 173-FZ are temporarily not applied. ConsultantPlus

It does not follow from this that no one is now concerned with what happens to export receivables. The agreement must still contain performance deadlines, and information on performance under a foreign trade contract continues to enter the banking system.

If a foreign buyer was supposed to pay on 1 June but the funds did not arrive, a very practical question follows: did the debt remain outstanding, was it paid later, did the parties make a set-off, change the deadline, novate the obligation, assign the claim, or use another permissible option?

For a business, this may be ordinary contract administration. For foreign exchange control, it is the history of a specific obligation that must be capable of being reconstructed from documents.

Registration Thresholds: RUB 10 Million, RUB 3 Million, and a Separate RUB 1 Million Threshold

For an export contract, the registration threshold is 10 million rubles. For an import contract and a loan agreement, it is 3 million rubles. This is expressly established by paragraph 4.3 of Bank of Russia Instruction No. 181-I. ConsultantPlus

What does it mean to register a contract?

The bank assigns the agreement a unique number and opens a Statement of bank control for it. Put simply, a separate bank record for the agreement is created. It contains information on the contract amount, payments, and other methods of performance.

The Instruction refers to this bank as the contract registration bank ("банк УК" in the Russian terminology).

The 10 million ruble threshold sometimes leads to an overly convenient conclusion: if an export agreement is for 7 or 8 million, foreign exchange control can be forgotten altogether. That is not so.

The same Instruction contains another threshold - 1 million rubles. For certain transactions under agreements where the amount of obligations does not exceed the equivalent of 1 million rubles, a simplified procedure applies. For example, for certain foreign currency transactions, the resident provides the bank with the transaction type code instead of the usual set of documents. The code tells the bank what kind of payment it is: export, import, loan, repayment, and so on. ConsultantPlus

Therefore, an agreement for 800,000 rubles, an agreement for 8 million rubles, and an agreement for 12 million rubles are in different situations.

In the first case, special simplifications may apply. In the second, the export contract has not yet reached the registration threshold, but currency legislation still applies to transactions under it. In the third, there is also an obligation to register the contract.

Framework Contracts: The Threshold Can Be Reached During Performance

With a contract that states a fixed price from the outset, everything is relatively straightforward. Framework agreements are more complicated.

Consider an ordinary situation. A Russian supplier has entered into an agreement with a foreign buyer. The total amount is not defined. Individual shipments are agreed in separate specifications.

The framework agreement itself still contains no line saying "11 million rubles." But actual performance has already crossed the threshold.

Instruction No. 181-I takes precisely such situations into account. For an agreement with an undefined amount, the time for registration is tied to the event after which the established threshold is reached.

If the matter concerns payments, the relevant transaction is what matters. If the goods are declared to customs, it is the declaration with which the value reached the threshold. If there is no ordinary goods declaration, for example for certain supplies within the EAEU, the Instruction takes into account the deadline for submitting the statistical form. ConsultantPlus

That is why it is not enough to review a framework agreement once, when it is signed.

At the time it is concluded, it may indeed not require registration. Six months later, the situation changes simply because the parties have made several deliveries.

This is where one of the typical organizational failures appears. The manager sees only the next specification. The accountant sees the next payment. The person responsible for foreign exchange control may not see the agreement's accumulated amount in real time at all.

Then it turns out that the threshold was crossed several transactions earlier.

A Foreign Account Does Not Eliminate Russian Bank Registration

A Russian company is entitled to have an account with a foreign bank. The mere existence of such an account does not constitute a violation.

But once it is opened, several different obligations arise, and they are often mistakenly treated as one.

First, the tax authority must be notified of the account. For legal entities and individual entrepreneurs, the general deadline for notifying the authority of the opening, closing, or change in the details of a foreign account is one month.

Then comes reporting on the movement of funds. From 1 April 2026, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs submit a quarterly report on foreign accounts within 30 working days after the end of the quarter. Previously, the period was 30 calendar days. Federal Tax Service

But it does not end there. The foreign trade contract itself may also have to be registered with a Russian bank.

And this is where an error arises that seems perfectly logical from an everyday perspective: "The money arrives in Kazakhstan, the Russian bank is not involved in the payment, so why register the agreement in Russia?"

Because having a foreign account does not cancel the Russian foreign exchange control rules that apply to the resident itself.

The version of Instruction No. 181-I in force after the 2026 amendments expressly regulates transactions through non-resident banks and foreign financial market organizations. ConsultantPlus

Moreover, violations connected with a foreign account must also be distinguished from one another.

A company can be late in notifying the tax authority. It can fail to submit an account report. It can violate the procedure for registering a foreign trade agreement. These are not the same thing.

That is precisely why Case No. A40-289057/2025 cannot be retold simply as a story that "a company opened an account in Kazakhstan and received a huge fine."

The account was only part of the arrangement. The problem was that currency transactions under export and import contracts that should have been registered with a Russian bank were carried out through it. The courts treated this as a violation of the procedure for conducting currency transactions, not simply as a delay in filing some report. Garant

The difference in monetary exposure is very noticeable here. Part 1 of Article 15.25 of the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation provides for a percentage-based fine for legal entities and individual entrepreneurs calculated from the amount of the transaction.

A foreign account is therefore better viewed not as a way to escape Russian foreign exchange control, but as an additional route under which the rules of the foreign bank and the Russian obligations of the resident must be observed at the same time.

Third-Party Payments and Set-Off: The Documents Must Connect the Events

Another ordinary situation is when one company is named as the buyer in the contract, but the funds are received from another.

For the business, the explanation may be simple. A parent company paid for its subsidiary. The buyer's partner discharged its debt. The parties are linked by common settlements within a group.

The bank does not know this in advance.

It sees an agreement with Company A and a payment from Company B. For these two events to become one understandable story, a document is needed to connect them.

This may be an agreement between the parties, a letter concerning payment by a third party, an agreement between the participants, or another document that genuinely explains why someone else performed the buyer's obligation.

The same applies to set-off.

A Russian company owes a foreign company USD 100,000, while the foreign company owes the Russian company the same amount under another agreement. The parties may decide not to move funds through several banks and instead terminate their mutual obligations by set-off.

Decree No. 529 generally permits set-off of claims against non-residents and obligations to them, as well as novation, unless special restrictions provide otherwise. ConsultantPlus

But for bank recordkeeping, the words "we set it off" are not enough.

It is necessary to understand what claims existed, under which agreements, in what amount, and from what date they ceased to exist.

Following the 2026 amendments, Instruction No. 181-I describes in even greater detail the cases where payments are made through foreign accounts or third parties participate in performance. ConsultantPlus

Therefore, a complex payment route is not in itself a problem.

The problem arises when the parties to the transaction know what happened, but the documents do not make it possible to understand it.

EAEU Trade Without a Standard Goods Declaration: How Performance Is Recorded

Trade within the EAEU creates its own illusion of simplicity.

Suppose a Russian company ships goods to Kazakhstan or Belarus. In such a situation, there may be no ordinary goods declaration of the kind filed for exports outside the Union.

This sometimes gives rise to the conclusion that if there is no goods declaration, there is nothing with which to substantiate the delivery to the bank.

In practice, Instruction No. 181-I works in a more complex way.

For registered contracts, the bank records not only movements of funds but also other methods of performing obligations. If goods are transferred, work is performed, the amount of an obligation changes, or the debt is terminated in another way, supporting documents and a certificate of supporting documents are provided for this purpose. ConsultantPlus

But one deadline cannot be applied mechanically to every situation here.

There are special rules for the movement of goods. Some information from declarations and statistical forms reaches the banking system through established channels. Paragraph 8.8 separately regulates, for example, exports with deferred payment and imports with prepayment. ConsultantPlus

Therefore, for a supply to an EAEU state, one should not begin with the statement: "There is no goods declaration, so we must submit this particular form within 15 days."

First, it is necessary to determine exactly how the agreement was performed, what document records that performance, and which provision of the Instruction applies to the transaction.

The absence of an ordinary goods declaration changes the way the supply is reflected. It does not make the contract disappear from bank records.

Cash, Sanctions, and Late Documents: Different Risks

Because of difficulties with international bank transfers, companies sometimes consider cash as a fallback option.

A Russian exporter is told: the buyer is ready to pay in cash. The first question is usually: can the money be accepted at all?

In some cases, it can.

Russian Government Resolution No. 2433 establishes a special procedure for cash settlements between residents and non-residents. It permits Russian legal entities and individual entrepreneurs to receive foreign currency or rubles in cash under foreign trade agreements, subject to the prescribed conditions. ConsultantPlus

At the same time, a cash payment must also be documented. As a general rule, documents concerning such payments are submitted to the bank within the prescribed period. Certain situations have special rules, so the figure "45 working days" cannot be used as a universal formula for every case.

For example, in the case of an advance payment, performance under the agreement may occur significantly later than the transfer of cash. The deadlines and set of documents must then be determined with the structure of the transaction itself in mind.

There is also a second question that belongs to an entirely different plane: can this cash physically be taken out of Russia?

Following the amendments of 29 September 2026, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs are prohibited from taking cash Russian rubles out of Russia to EAEU states, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan regardless of the amount, except for expressly provided exceptions. If the prohibition is violated, the rubles of the legal entity or individual entrepreneur are subject to seizure in full. ConsultantPlus

This can therefore create a situation that at first glance seems contradictory: a cash payment under a foreign trade agreement is permitted, while a particular method of moving the received rubles across the border is prohibited.

There is no contradiction. These are simply two different transactions governed by different rules.

Sanctions restrictions have long been part of the ordinary practice of international payments.

A payment may be held up at a correspondent bank. A foreign bank may return the funds. A counterparty may report that its bank no longer works with Russia-related payments.

For commercial correspondence, the phrase "the payment did not go through because of sanctions" is usually enough. For a case involving liability, that explanation may be insufficient.

Special Note 10 to Article 15.25 of the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation did indeed provide an exemption from liability in a number of cases where the violation was connected with foreign restrictive measures. But it applied to legal relations during a specified period in 2022-2023. That exemption cannot automatically be extended to a violation in 2026.

This does not mean that sanctions have ceased to matter. What must be proved is not the existence of sanctions in general, but what happened to the specific payment.

This is where a payment returned by the bank, a SWIFT message, a letter from the foreign bank, correspondence with the buyer, an attempt to change the currency, a proposal to make payment through another permissible bank, or documents concerning set-off or amended contract terms carry weight.

The more specifically the history of the failed payment is reconstructed, the less the dispute looks like an after-the-fact explanation.

After a bank inquiry, it often turns out that the parties did not put some of their arrangements in writing at all.

The buyer had long asked for payments from another company to be accepted, but this remained only in correspondence between managers. A set-off was actually made, but no separate instrument was drawn up. The payment deadline was changed in practice, but an amendment was never signed.

An attempt to put the documents in order after a question has arisen does not in itself mean that a violation occurred.

The counterparty may later confirm the actual arrangement. The parties may draw up a document concerning an event that really took place. What matters is not the date on which the document was created by itself, but whether its content corresponds to what actually happened.

It is an entirely different matter when a document invents a new version of a transfer that has already taken place.

Article 193.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation concerns the transfer of funds to non-residents' bank accounts while submitting to the bank documents containing knowingly false information about the grounds, purposes, or intended use of the transfer. ConsultantPlus

In other words, the problem is not that the document appeared late. The problem is deliberately false information used in an attempt to explain the transfer.

This distinction is also useful in ordinary dealings with a bank. If a document has been lost or was not prepared on time, it can be reconstructed. But what must be reconstructed is the real history of the transaction, not a more convenient one.

The Key Question: Can the Performance History Be Reconstructed?

Let us return to the case with which this article began.

The company had genuine foreign trade agreements. Funds were in fact received and transferred through an account in Kazakhstan. The foreign account itself was not prohibited either.

The dispute arose because the actual transactions under those agreements did not comply with the mandatory procedure for registering them with a Russian bank.

This is perhaps the most useful way to look at foreign exchange control in 2026.

There is a contract. It states the parties, amount, and deadlines. Then the real life of the contract begins: goods are shipped, the buyer pays, payment arrives from a third party, the parties make a set-off, change the deadline, or use a foreign account.

Each such event leaves its own documentary trail.

If an agreement reaches 10 million rubles, the question of registration arises.

If the funds go to a foreign account, rules concerning the account itself, reporting, and registration of the foreign trade agreement come into play.

If another person pays, the connection between that payment and the buyer must be clear.

If the debt is terminated by set-off, this must be visible not only to the parties but also to the bank.

If goods are shipped within the EAEU without an ordinary goods declaration, it is necessary to determine which document and which rule govern how performance is reflected.

A zero mandatory sale ratio for foreign currency does not cancel any of this. It simply removes the obligation to sell the prescribed portion of the foreign currency received.

For an exporter, therefore, the question "what percentage of foreign currency must be sold now?" is far from the most dangerous one.

It is much more useful to imagine in advance what a bank employee or foreign exchange control authority will open a few months later. Will that person be able to determine from the agreement, payments, and supporting documents who owed what to whom, who paid, and why the obligation is treated as performed?

In Case No. A40-289057/2025, that is precisely where the problem arose. The initial fine was almost 20 million rubles. Garant