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Excluding Russia from global banking’s SWIFT messaging system was always seen as an extreme option to punish President Vladimir Putin for his actions in Ukraine. Some were reluctant to impose it; France’s finance minister called it “the financial nuclear weapon.”
SWIFT -- the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication -- is the Gmail of global banking. It delivers secure messages among more than 11,000 financial institutions and companies in over 200 countries and territories, handling trillions of dollars in transactions. The message traffic -- 42 million a day on average last year -- includes orders and confirmations for payments, trades and currency exchanges. A member-owned cooperative, based just outside Brussels, SWIFT was founded in 1973 to end reliance on the telex system.
A country cut off from SWIFT can suffer significant economic pain. That’s what happened to Iran in 2012, when its banks lost access as part of European Union sanctions targeting the country’s nuclear program and its sources of finance. (Many of the banks were reconnected in 2016 after the EU took them off its sanctions list.) When Western nations threatened Russia’s access to SWIFT in 2014, Alexei Kudrin, a onetime finance minister close to Putin, estimated that it could reduce Russia’s gross domestic product by 5% in a year.
The U.S. was working with European Union partners to finalize the list of Russian banks to be cut off from SWIFT. It was set to include seven lenders including state-controlled VTB, Bank Rossiya and Bank Otkritie, according to an EU draft. Some of those targeted already faced other sanctions. Sberbank and Gazprombank were excluded from the proposal, underscoring concern over the potential economic fallout for Europe. Sberbank has twice as many assets as any other bank in Russia and Gazprombank is a key bank for Russia’s energy conglomerates...
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