Sri Lanka is not ready to use its infrastructure to accept cards of the Russian payment system Mir due to sanctions, the local central bank said in its Twitter account (NYSE:TWTR).

“Due to US sanctions on the Mir payment system, as confirmed by Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Bank is unable at this stage to positively consider the request to use Mir cards in the banking system,” the account said.

On September 15, OFAC published a clarification according to which non-US financial institutions entering into agreements with the Russian National Payment Card System (NPCS, the operator of the Mir payment system) risk being involved in actions to circumvent US sanctions by expanding the territory of use of the Mir payment system outside of Russia. The clarification also specified that the NSPC itself is not on the sanctions lists. At the same time with the publication of this document OFAC added Vladimir Komlev, the head of the NSPC, to the list.

Following the OFAC report, banks in Turkey and a number of other countries, which had previously accepted “Mir” cards, announced their refusal to work with the Russian payment system.

Currently, information on the countries where Mir cards are accepted is not available on the NSPC website. As of early September, “Mir” cards were accepted in 11 countries: Turkey, Vietnam, South Korea, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The possibility of accepting the cards was also being worked out with Cuba, Egypt and Venezuela.