“We are not talking about this. It is simply impossible de facto. Well, they turned off Iran, so what? Nothing. Turn off Russia with oil, gas and all things. Are they laughing? It was immediately clear. . Oh, are you scared? Okay, then we won’t,” he said.
Context:
The SWIFT system allows banks and companies to exchange financial messages around the world. For settlements within Russia, there are other ways of working, however international transactions without SWIFT are not possible.
In March 2021, Kremlin speaker Dmitry Peskov said that the situation in world politics “obliges Russia to take into account all possible threats from the West”, therefore the Russian authorities do not exclude the option of disconnecting Russia from SWIFT.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that in Russia there is a basis for creating an analogue SWIFT systems.
December 1 US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken threatened to impose sanctions against the Russian Federation, “from which the United States previously abstained,” in the event of aggression against Ukraine. Among the possible sanctions are American media, in particular CNN, call Russia’s disconnection from SWIFT. The US State Department confirmed that are considering this possibility.
The European Parliament stated that “the EU must be ready to use its influence and call for Russia to be disconnected from the SWIFT payment system“, back in September. On December 16, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in which urged to disconnect the Russian Federation from the SWIFT system in the next package of sanctions in case of new aggression against Ukraine.
On January 17, 2022, the German edition of Handelsblatt reported, citing sources in the German government, that the US and the EU changed their minds about disconnecting Russian banks from SWIFT, but are preparing other economic sanctions against large financial institutions of the Russian Federation (Reuters sources in the White House refuted it). The White House said that the United States don’t give up on ideas disconnect RF from SWIFT in case of its further invasion of Ukraine.
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