It is up to Hungary alone to cut the Russians out of the world’s financial circuits
We already reported that in the morning and Reuters Germany and Italy, which had previously expressed reservations about the measure, are already inclined to exclude Russian banks from SWIFT, so the next round already includes this measure.
According to news leaked from Thursday’s EU summit, “Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Hungary, among others” were opposed to more severe sanctions, mainly exclusion from the SWIFT system. (Politico is still in Austria he mentioned among the more cautious countries.)
Thus, according to today’s news, the camp of the opponents is shrinking to a minimum (if only it has not completely disappeared), there is no news about the new position of Austria and Hungary, which are the opposing countries according to the previous news. Cyprus’s position on the issue is prominent because the country has very strong ties with Russia through the banking system. (According to more malicious interpretations, Russian criminals and oligarchs remained key customers of the Cypriot banking system after the country’s bankruptcy.) The Ukrainian Foreign Minister also enthusiastically commented on the news in Cyprus:
We did it. Cyprus has confirmed that it will not block the decision to ban Russia from SWIFT. Ukrainian diplomacy works 24 hours a day, seven days a week to make important decisions and protect Ukraine from Russian occupiers.
– Dmytro (Kuleba) February 26, 2022
In a new Twitter post on the Kyiv Independent newspaper, only the EU member state is opposed to the move. He would have added that it was not clear that this meant that the Hungarian government was still opposed to the move, or that it simply did not express itself with the other countries on the issue (or that the position was not leaked).
⚡️Cyprus and Italy change their position and support the separation of Russia from SWIFT. Source: Dmitro Kuleba FM, President Volodymyr Zelensky after talks with the Cypriot and Italian leadership. Hungary remains the only EU country opposed to this measure.
– Dmytro (Kuleba) February 26, 2022
During the morning, Reuters reported information in line with the above:
Within days, a decision will be made to cut Russia out of the global SWIFT payment system, the president of a eurozone country’s central bank told Reuters on Saturday.
SWIFT is only a matter of time, very short time, days
said the central bank governor, who asked for his name to be withheld.
Sufficient? No. Required? Absolutely. Sanctions only make sense if both parties have costs, and that will be the cost
he added to the central banker.
We wrote about what SWIFT is and what is important here. Short:
Founded in 1973, the SWIFT system was the answer for banks to the question of how to move money between bank accounts through a worldwide network. The platform is owned by roughly 2,500 banks, is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and is used by banks to move hundreds of billions of dollars annually. SWIFT is not a transfer or clearing system in the classical sense, not “international Giro Zrt.”, But
A MESSAGE NETWORK THROUGH 11 THOUSAND BANKS IN MORE THAN 200 COUNTRIES CONNECTED TO THE MAILING BANKING SYSTEM THROUGH THE MAILING BANK
This is done in a secure, controlled way in the SWIFT system, in formats according to pre-defined standards. The Bloomberg theme cutter in Article According to SWIFT, it is nothing more than a global Gmail system for banks, a telecommunications device through which it exchanged 42 million messages a day last year.
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