Punishing Putin Swiftly

Today on TAP: If not now, when?

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SWIFT is the global interbank payments system. It stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Last year, SWIFT processed some ten billion transaction messages for more than 11,000 banks. Barring Russia from SWIFT would crush its ability to conduct economic transactions in dollars or euros.

Before Putin’s incursion into eastern Ukraine turned into a full-blown blitzkrieg, Biden’s strategy was to gradually match sanctions to Russia’s actions, holding in reserve the more severe sanction of cutting Russia off from the world’s banking system.

But now, lesser deterrence has failed utterly. SWIFT might as well stand for So Why Is the Fricking Temporizing?

More from Robert Kuttner

The explanation is not Biden’s hesitancy, but Europe’s. Biden has done well at pulling a reluctant Europe into a tougher stance; but several EU nations, most notably Germany and France, have refused so far to kick Russia out of SWIFT (thought France has not ruled it out).

They fear that this escalation by the West would result in an even more severe cutoff of energy supplies, as well as prolongation of the general economic disruption created by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But there’s also a paradox—the more the West’s sanctions pinch, the more Russia will need to get its oil and gas to world markets and will be as desperate to sell as the Europeans are to buy.

In the meantime, however, other financial sanctions agreed to by the G7 are doing damage.

Clearstream and Euroclear, the European bank clearing networks, have banned transactions in rubles, and several leading Russian banks have had transactions frozen. As a result, the Russian bond market has collapsed, and Russia’s main stock market index fell 33 percent yesterday.

Bottom line: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not quite the cakewalk he imagined. Putin has severely damaged Russia’s economy and his own standing at home. Nor is it possible to occupy a resistant nation of 41 million people, except at overwhelming cost.

Now is the time to maximize sanctions against Putin, with all deliberate swiftness.

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