Biden is reportedly considering kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global interbank network. May not happen, but it was formerly off the table, and is now under consideration. Apparently due to increasing support from the EU. Germany is still opposed, AIUI. If it happens, it would be financially crippling to the Russian economy.
Russian citizens seem to be pretty afraid of it. If the goal is to make the people start to turn on Putin, I suspect that it would be good to ramp up the tension by continuing to talk it over for a few more days, rather than going for it immediately.
Won’t the ultimate decision to disable SWIFT transfers to and from Russia come down to the Belgian government? They (SWIFT and Belgium) have said “no” to the US in the past just over providing records of transfers. A request to partially disable the system is asking them to shitcan SWIFT’s reputation as a neutral entity forever.
It seems to me like “neutral” could be taken to mean “neutral between socialist economies and capitalist economies, not preferring the East nor the West” but it could also be taken to mean, “neutral before any party who is lawfully engaging with the rest of the world”.
Granted, for the latter, it might behoove them to ask that some international court give the order.
SWIFT is a cooperative owned by its ~2000 member banks, not by the Belgian government. It just happens to be headquartered in Belgium. The kerfuffle with Belgium and the EU had to to with the US allegedly violating EU privacy laws in its monitoring of SWIFT messages. To the best of my understanding neither Belgium nor the US nor anyone else has unilateral control over its operations, and it would take a consensus of the major participating nations to make a decision about Russia. Some of the opposition from countries like Germany is because they’re major importers of Russian energy and need to be able to pay for it.
Meh, this is a problem we already know how to solve:
The thing is, this situation could reasonably be regarded as something analogous to 1939 (in my, perhaps simplistic, opinion) and in that case, I don’t see anything unreasonable about your suggestions.
Or the EU can order it, which it did a decade ago, when it directed that Iran be cut off from SWIFT.
So does SWIFT only lose its reputation as a neutral entity if a European / Western country is cut off, but not if it’s country outside the European/West areas? (Treating Russia as European for the purposes of this discussion.)
I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks!
Since we’re discussing dream sanctions, why not nationalize all the stuff owned by Russian oligarchs and sell it to the highest non-Russian bidder? The UK could confiscate Chelsea FC and sell it off, and so on.
Note: I don’t believe that North Korea is on SWIFT, either:
Oligarch can mean “wealthy Russian person” and it can mean “wealthy Russian person who supports Putin”.
My belief and hope would be that we target the second kind. If you just go for the first, there’s no one on the side of good, who has power.
I’m having trouble finding the report from a news source I trust, but there are reports that two Chinese banks have suspended lending to Russia. I saw the headline on Bloomberg, but I don’t have subscription.
Well apparently there has already been a call in Parliament for Roman Abramovich to be sanctioned, so he has handed over control of Chelsea to trustees of the club’s charitable foundation.
Doesn’t stop Parliament from passing the “Sequestration of Russian Oligarchs Property Act” and assigning the property and management to an Oligarchs Property Trustee for the duration. That’s what they did with property of Germans, Italians, etc during WWII.
YouTube has de-monetized a number of Russian channels:
YouTube on Saturday barred Russian state-owned media outlet RT and other Russian channels from receiving money for advertisements that run with their videos, similar to a move by Facebook, after the invasion of Ukraine.
Videos from the affected channels also will come up less often in recommendations, YouTube spokesperson Farshad Shadloo said. He added that RT and several other channels would no longer be accessible in Ukraine due to a Ukrainian government request.
I agree that only the harshest sanctions – the ones that also entail a sacrifice from ordinary people in the West, like sanctions on natural gas and oil – would have an effect. And even if we get such sanctions, it’s not likely that Western governments will maintain them long-term.
So sanctions really have an infinitesimal chance of influencing Russian aggression against Ukraine.
And yet… and yet…
Imagine a world where we do not even try, through sanctions, to express our revulsion toward the Kremlin for this invasion. Imagine that, where trade with Russia is concerned, we throw up our hands and just continue business as usual.
What message would that send to everyone watching – for instance, to ordinary people in Russia? To would-be dictators outside Russia? And what would it do to our own morale?
It would be pure defeatism.
In another thread, Fiendish Astronaut posted that they are planning to lock out a list of Russian banks from the SWIFT system. I haven’t seen an article on it, but he was saying it’s been confirmed.
Just coming through on my BBC News app: “EU, US and allies agree to cut off a number of Russian banks from main international payment system Swift.”