According to CNN, the White House is considering the possibility of imposing sanctions on Russia in connection with the situation around Ukraine. Allegedly, the main blow of these sanctions is planned to be directed at the banking sector of Russia, which they will try to limit in dollar transfers or even disconnect from the international system of bank payments SWIFT.
SWIFT is an international interbank system for transferring information and making payments, whose members today are more than 11 thousand financial organizations from more than 200 countries. Today, about 78% of all international currency transfers are made through it.
New sanctions against Russia, which are being discussed in the Joe Biden administration, allegedly include personal restrictions against “those close to President Vladimir Putin” and against leading Russian energy producers such as Rosneft and Gazprom.
Since SWIFT is de jure independent of both the dollar and the United States, the issue of involving the system in any financial restrictions or sanctions has always been difficult. This was clearly manifested at the time of the confrontation between the United States and Iran over the nuclear program of the Islamic republic, during which Washington imposed unilateral banking sanctions against Tehran, banning financial transactions with Iran.
At first, SWIFT resisted such arbitrariness of the United States and refused to disconnect Iran from its payment system, but the US Senate imposed sanctions against SWIFT itself, after which the system quickly agreed to restrict Iranian banks in access to international currency transfers.
Considering the case with Iran as a dangerous precedent, large countries took care of creating analogs of SWIFT, but already under national control. So, in 2015, China launched its analogue of such a system – CIPS, which today occupies a significant share in the financial sector, which conducts international settlements in the country.
In Russia, at the end of 2014, in the wake of the first “banking” sanctions related to the reunification of Crimea with Russia, it launched the Financial Messaging System (SPFS), through which the vast majority of domestic Russian interbank traffic has been going for several years, bypassing SWIFT protocols.
This system has incorporated all the latest achievements of the industry. In 2019, the Russian interbank system of fast payments (SBP) was launched, which left the international payment systems Visa and Mastercard, taking as a basis the payment system of the Bank of Russia.
Thus, the statements about the “disconnection” of SWIFT for Russia, as well as for Iran several years ago, already looks absolutely meaningless for the United States. Such an action can be physically performed only by introducing a complete ban on US companies and banks from working with Russian banks and companies and by introducing a total blocking of correspondent accounts of Russian organizations in the US banking system. However, such measures will rather look like a “shot in the foot”: in the current world, this will only lead to self-isolation of the United States and to Russia’s transition to trading in rubles and other world currencies.