Visa and Mastercard will resume business in Crimea as usual in April once their transactions start going through Russia’s National Payment Card System processing centre, according to Anatoly Aksakov, deputy head of the State Duma’s financial committee. “A unified Russian transaction processing centre will begin functioning in April,” told a press conference in Simferopol yesterday (February 6). “America won’t even see it and will not be able to block cards [regardless whether they are] Russian Ukrainian, German, American or Japanese.” Visa and Mastercard stopped providing services to Crimean last December. rbth