Online Gambling Law in Ukraine

Updated: 2025

The current online gambling laws in Ukraine are unfavorable for operators, but have minimal impact on players. Like many other nations, Ukraine has a prohibition on the operation of any gambling site within its borders. Individual players are not the target of this ban. In fact, they are able to access a wide range of foreign betting sites.

The sites we recommend to Ukrainians are not licensed in Ukraine, but are safe. All the sites we mention here are licensed elsewhere and are considered safe.

Current Gaming Laws

The form of gambling, in all its staircases and portal ways, which was not the lottery, was effectively banned by law in Ukraine in 2009. The law brought down the curtain on all gambling establishments in the natural world, meaning physical casinos and gambling parlors. It also brought the world of online gambling under the cloud of prohibition.

Operators found a "loophole" in the 2009 law that allowed them to move their servers out of Ukraine and continue to serve customers inside Ukraine over the Internet. So the government passed an amendment to the law in 2011 - and that put an end to it.

Internet gambling is alive and well in Ukraine; it just doesn't benefit Ukrainian companies. The legality of online gambling for individuals is a bit murky, but that doesn't seem to matter. Ukrainians can and do frequent the hundreds of foreign gaming sites where they can bet, play poker, and try their luck at various games of chance that you might find in a land-based casino. Most of the big names in Internet gambling are more than happy to accept customers from Ukraine.

The other countries we discuss here at Gambling-Giant.org can be directly compared to Ukraine. It has a solid set of gambling laws, just like the rest of us, but those laws are rather "impotent" when it comes to really stopping people from gambling.

Instability in Ukraine

As this is being written, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is very much alive. The unresolved outcome, however, is already certain to affect online gambling in some way. The key question is how much and in what way online betting will be affected. It is clear that the interim government set up in the immediate aftermath of the revolution is having unexpected and dramatic effects of its own.

Prior to the revolution in Ukraine, the government stated that it was considering the possibility of not only legalizing, but also regulating online gambling. Meanwhile, in today's Ukraine, those plans are as good as dead... or are they?

How has Russia's seizure of Crimea changed things? In April 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed legislation to create a gambling zone in Crimea. His hope was that it would become a major gambling destination like Las Vegas or Macau. However, this is unlikely to include provisions for online gambling due to Russia's antipathy towards e-gaming.