British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pushing hard to get Russia out of the SWIFT international payment system, which would be a serious blow to Russian banks and Russia’s ability to trade abroad.
However, German Chancellor Olaf Schulz warned Johnson on Thursday that his country would not support such a drastic step as the European Union, officials said. financial times.
Earlier, Reuters also wrote that the European Union would not support this solution.
SWIFT, (Association for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) based in Belgium, is a network for sending and receiving credit transfers or information related to credit transfers. It is supervised by the central banks of the United States, Japan and Europe.
Getting Russia out of SWIFT would be a serious blow to its largest banks and limit the country’s ability to trade across borders. It would also prevent Russia from recovering international profits from its oil and gas exports, which account for more than 40 percent of its income.
More than 11 thousand people use SWIFT services. Banks and financial institutions around the world. In 2020, Russia accounted for 1.5 percent. All Transactions.
Russia’s cutting off of the SWIFT payment system has long been considered an option under the EU sanctions package, but so far it has not been seen as a true part of the sanctions package, rather it has been kept as an additional deterrent. However, the scale of the Russian invasion of Ukraine sparked a renewed debate about whether this option should be accelerated.
The head of the Dutch central bank, Klaas Knott, has expressed doubts about Russia’s isolation from the SWIFT system, and, as head of the Financial Stability Board – an institution that monitors the international financial system – has expressed concerns about the consequences of such a move for the European financial system.
