According to the report - which cites company executives and financial sources - some Russians are using cryptocurrency to "invest in real estate" in the UAE, while others want to use firms there to turn their virtual money into hard currency and stash it elsewhere.  One crypto firm has received lots of queries in the past 10 days from Swiss brokers asking to liquidate billions of dollars of bitcoin because their clients are afraid Switzerland will freeze their assets, adding that none of the requests had been for less than $2 billion.

If accurate, that would naturally indicate that the recent Citi report suggesting that Russian crypto purchases had been de minimis was dead wrong, and instead Russians have been busy scooping up cryptos, just not in Rubles but in other currencies, which is why Citi never captured the transactions.