The Foreign Ministry considered Russia capable of replacing SWIFT with a domestic analogue

The Foreign Ministry said that Russia is ready to disconnect from the SWIFT international payment order exchange system - if this happens, the country will use other systems. The Kremlin did not rule out the possibility of disconnecting Russians from Visa and Mastercard.

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin said that while Moscow does not refuse to use SWIFT, but if the country is denied this as a sanction measure, the authorities will use "other systems." When asked by a journalist how SWIFT could be replaced, the official could not answer.

Today, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that, given the US sanctions policy, none of the threats can be ruled out. He noted that further sanctions may lead to the fact that the Russians will lose the opportunity to use cards of the international payment systems Visa and MasterCard, but he did not see a problem in this. According to Peskov, the Russian payment system "Mir" has already "strengthened" and "no one has any doubts" that in the future it will be "used globally."

In March, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia was already "working to stop using Western-controlled international payment systems." And at the end of February, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview with Bloomberg that Russia needed to fence itself off “from the US financial and economic system” and weaken the role of the dollar in calculations.

• Washington has been threatening to cut Russia off the system for years, but has yet to take concrete action. In early April, the European Parliament again called for Russia to be disconnected from SWIFT - the reason for such sanctions could be the deteriorating health of Alexei Navalny in the colony.

• SWIFT is a financial network that provides international transfers. It supports the majority of interbank transactions, connecting over 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries around the world. So far, the only country that has actually been cut off from SWIFT is Iran, which happened in 2018.

• Moscow is creating its own analogue of SWIFT - Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS). It is assumed that the Russian version of SWIFT will be linked to the Chinese cross-border interbank payment system CIPS and the Indian payment mechanism. Also, the Russian system will work with the Iranian SEPAM.

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About what kind of US sanctions threaten Russia and when, The Bell spoke in detail here .