NEW YORK, June 6. /TASS/. It is possible to exclude Russia from the SWIFT payment network but it won’t be economically reasonable, Navigator Principal Investors Director Kyle Shostak told TASS.
"The possibility is real, discussions have been going on for quite a while," he said. "It’s a very radical measure that a European organization based in Brussels can take, which is a non-governmental organization. However, history has shown that they give in to US pressure, like they did with Iran," the expert pointed out.
Shostak said that "there is no financial sense" in such measures, "there is only Russophobia." He was hopeful that logic would prevail and the presidents of Russia and the United States would be able to resolve bilateral issues at their meeting in Geneva, bringing tensions down.
According to the expert, it is impossible to exclude the entire country from SWIFT but a number of big state banks, which control a large share of the banking sector, could be banned from the system. Such actions will trigger a chain reaction and, apart from export and import shortages due to the impossibility to conduct transactions as usual, they will also create problems for Russian bank card holders in other countries.
The European Parliament earlier called for imposing sanctions on Russia’s Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation, the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project and Russian "oligarchs," as well as for excluding Russia from SWIFT if the country’s "military build-up were in the future to be transformed into an invasion of Ukraine.".