Ukraine has a licensed online poker market. Almost nobody writes about it
Ukraine gives online poker its own licence category — rarer than it sounds — regulates it through PlayCity, and has operators withhold 18% tax plus a 5% military levy at source. Meanwhile its players keep making European final tables from Kyiv, Khmelnytskyi and Luhansk.
Ukraine is one of the few countries in Europe that treats online poker as its own thing. Law No. 768-IX, passed on 14 July 2020, ended the blanket prohibition in force since 2009 and created separate licence categories — betting, online casino, land-based casino, and **online poker as a category of its own**. Most regulated markets fold poker into a general online gaming licence and forget about it.
The regulator changed in January 2025, when KRAIL was dissolved and replaced by PlayCity, a digital licensing platform run under the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Applications are processed through a portal with tracked, timestamped decisions rather than committee votes — a deliberate answer to the bottlenecks that had paralysed the old commission.
Tax is the part players notice. Winnings carry 18% personal income tax plus a 5% military levy, and the licensed operator withholds and remits both at the point of payment. Nothing to calculate, nothing to declare. That is a real argument for playing inside the licensed market rather than outside it, and it is rarely made.
All of this has continued through a war. Martial law has been in force since February 2022. Clubs in Kyiv and Lviv have kept running tournaments around curfews and air-raid protocols; Ukrainian players have kept qualifying for and travelling to European festivals.
The results are the part that stops you. Ruslan Prydryk finished **fifth in the 2023 WSOP Main Event for $2,400,000**, listing Luhansk as home. Andrey Lyubovetskiy won a WSOP Europe bracelet in Rozvadov in 2021 and still lists Khmelnytskyi. Oleksii Kovalchuk has two bracelets and lives in Kyiv. Nazar Buhaiov is 103rd in the world right now, playing out of Budva — one of the Montenegrin towns that became a hub for players who left after 2022.
At the top, Igor Yaroshevskyy sits 110th on the all-time list with $15.45m, most of it won on the Triton circuit since 2024. Eugene Katchalov and Yevgeniy Timoshenko carry the previous generation's major titles — the Doyle Brunson Classic and the WPT World Championship.
We have published Ukraine's top players, its legal position and its tax treatment this week. It is a market with real regulation, real players and almost no English-language coverage, which is usually a sign that everyone else is looking somewhere else.