You may never have heard of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications — or at least not by its full name. Even if you had you may have mistaken it for a fairly inconsequential trade body that holds rather dull conferences in hotel function rooms in places like Frankfurt.
Yet it finds itself at the centre of the West’s response against Vladimir Putin. Swift, as it is otherwise known, is the system by which banks communicate in order to undertake cross-border financial transactions. This morning the Ukrainian foreign minister pleaded with the West to cut off Russia from the system. Britain would like to do just that, as would some of the smaller EU states. But the German Chancellor, Olaf Sholz, doesn’t want to cut off Russia from financial transactions and neither, for the moment, does Joe Biden.
Would it make a difference in any case? Putin would hardly withdraw his forces from Ukraine purely on account of the West cutting off Swift — even if it would cause financial turmoil in the short term.
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