As a Russian I can tell you and everyone else drawing parallels with the past forget there were no sanctions at the scale as currently applied to putin and there were no crypto at the time.

If there were strict sanctions in place, they would not be able to fly to cyprus as you say. And if there was crypto, they would be far more efficient at doing what you describe because they don't even need to pay for the planes and a bunch of people to move cash (people who steal it and can leak the information).

And people called me naive in this thread. The real or faked naivety of crypto pushers is what knows no limits...