The Ukraine Cabinet of Ministers has approved a bill that would bring legal gambling to the country. In a September 30 press briefing, Prime Minister Alexei Goncharuk said the country wants to derive benefits from the industry rather than letting people spend their money on illegal games.
“You know what’s going on: you go outside, you see these slot machines, next to the pawnshops. I don’t think we need to explain what the problem is,” he said. “A lot of people are suffering from this and we want to protect people who are addicted, because people then have depression, suicides, families are destroyed, people lose money. These are tens of thousands of broken human lives, and we want this to end in Ukraine. There should be no such thing in civilized countries.
“The bill spells out how we propose to regulate gambling, and lotteries will be regulated separately. But the main goal is to remove slot machines from the streets, to reduce this disaster they create for us.”
The text of the draft bill has not been made public, but the law reportedly would permit gambling “exclusively on the territory of hotels, with use of gambling equipment with software that meets international standards.”
According to Ukrayinska Pravda, the bill will include a license fee of UAH 38 million (US$1.5 million) to operate a casino in Kiev, UAH 25 million for a casino in one of the four other cities with a population of 1 million or more and UAH 12.5 million elsewhere.
According to iGamingBusiness.com, all gambling except state-run lotteries became illegal in Ukraine in 2009, after nine people were killed in a fire at a slots parlor in Dnipropetrovsk. Since 2015, the government has considered bringing back legal gambling; in April 2017, it promised to do so by 2018. Last month President Volodymyr Zelensky directed his government to make it happen by the end of the year.
