CIS Satellite 2015

I don't know what you mean by "occupied" – when I was there last summer, I didn't notice any particularly unhappy people due to the occupation; I'll observe again this summer. ;) And there were plenty of Sberbank branches there, weren't there?

"occupied" should be put in quotation marks. It's much more complicated with money transfers. We don't have proper Russian banks, only subsidiaries. Basically, to avoid sanctions, they came up with a scheme. Sberbank has been almost gone for the same reason for about a year now. I think if you really want to send money, it won't be difficult, but I've encountered difficulties like "give us some recipient account that is linked to a phone number," etc.