Ukraine's PlayCity Opens Tender To Block Military From Gambling
Ukraine's State Agency for Gambling and Lotteries Regulation, known as PlayCity, has opened a tender for a software module that will automatically block serving military personnel from online gambling accounts, according to a statement published on PlayCity's official website on August 24, 2026.
The module will link two state registers: PlayCity's Register of Persons Restricted from Access to Gambling and the Ministry of Defence's State Register of Military Personnel. Data will pass between the two systems through Trembita, the government's electronic interoperability platform, allowing gambling operators to check a player's status against both registers without seeing why a live casino account is restricted.
The check is designed to run at the point a player registers or logs in. A gambling operator first queries the Register of Persons Restricted from Access to Gambling. If no restriction is found there, the system automatically runs a second check against the State Register of Military Personnel.
If either register returns a match, the operator's system blocks the account automatically. PlayCity has stressed that operators will see only a restricted or not-restricted result, with no visibility into a player's military status or which register triggered the block.
A Deadline Set By Government Decree
The build is required under Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 804, adopted on June 17, 2026 and published a week later on June 24, 2026.
That resolution set a six-month window from publication for PlayCity and the defence ministry to build and test the connection, putting the deadline at December 24, 2026.
Once the module is complete, PlayCity says the two bodies will test the exchange for accuracy before signing a joint act confirming the system works.
PlayCity will publish that act on its own website, and the automatic restriction mechanism takes effect only from the date of that publication, not before.
Existing Self-Exclusion Options
Ukraine's existing self-exclusion tools remain open to any citizen in the meantime, regardless of military status. A person can apply to restrict their own access for a term of six months to three years, after which every licensed operator must honour the restriction once it is logged on the register.
Immediate family members or legal guardians can also file a substantiated request to restrict someone else's access, PlayCity said, in cases such as gambling spend that exceeds a person's income, debts left unpaid, more than three months of missed child support, or reliance on housing subsidies linked to financial hardship.
Restrictions filed this way run for six months and can be extended, and both self-exclusion and third-party applications can be submitted online through PlayCity's own website. The military-register tender is one of several data and enforcement projects PlayCity has run since its first year of operation.
Earlier initiatives listed on its website include a tender for a second phase of its own state gambling monitoring system and a research programme it says found 86% of players choosing licensed online casinos over unlicensed ones, part of a wider push to track how the two-year-old regulated market is bedding in alongside enforcement tools such as this one.
