Russia’s government says its gambling advertising rules don’t extend to internationally-based online portals such as YouTube … for now.

Earlier this month, Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) announced that its ability to enforce its online edicts extended only as far as three Russian domains – .ru, .su and .рф — and thus it lacks the authority to prohibit Russian-language online advertising available on international sites such as YouTube.

The announcement came as a blow to Russia’s Internet Video Association (IVA), which had complained about Russian-language videos promoting online casinos such as Azino777 appearing on YouTube and (more importantly) on file-sharing sites offering bootleg copies of Russian intellectual property.

However, the FAS later announced that it would submit a “request” to YouTube’s owner Google to ascertain ways of preventing advertising of prohibited services from being beamed across Russia’s digital borders. The FAS also said it would convene a working group of “experts in the field of internet technologies and advertising” to crack this nut.