Edit 2: I confirmed it. I was able to choose a payment option only if I wanted to send money in rubles. Thanks to everyone who gave advice, and a MAJOR thank you to  Juliy_Miuliy

Edit: According to  Juliy_Miuliy this is fixed by sending the money in Rubles. I can’t confirm it myself but given how wonky paypal can be about this stuff, I totally believe it. If anyone else can confirm I would greatly appreciate it.

Today I tried to pay for a new commission, and the artist involved had a Russian account. For some reason, paypal refused to allow me to complete the transaction, stating that it could not be completed due to regulations. This happened regardless of how I tried:

- She had sent an invoice, and that did not work
- I tried manually entering her paypal email, and that didn't work
- I then went into a transaction I did with her several months ago (which had worked back then with no issues), and tried to send money via "repeat transaction"... and THAT didn't work either.

Proof: https://imgur.com/a/zJcAlQd

I checked online and apparently this happens occasionally to people who are trying to do transactions between the US and either certain Eastern European countries or Russia. I confirmed this with a friend who had recently successfully done a transaction with the same artist, but resides in Canada. He also confirmed that paypal could be subject to the same regulations of any US financial institution and thus may have recently been forced under a stricter policy.

As such, if you do want to commission an artist in Russia, make sure that you can first send that artist money so as to save you and the artist headaches. You can find workarounds for this such as getting help from someone in another country you CAN send money to, but just be prepared to jump through several more hoops to make the transaction.

The good news is you can easily tell if you're under that restriction: if you have an invoice from a Russian artist or know the artist' paypal info, you just put it in, put in a price, then click "next". If you are under the restriction, it will block you from being able to choose a payment source, so there's no risk of accidentally sending money.

I'm assuming this issue will also happen if you live in Russia and try to send money to a US artist but I can't confirm it.

TL;DR: Apparently Paypal has imposed restrictions on transactions between people in the US and Russia, and I wanted to give people fair warning about it.