Seven Russian banks have been removed from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging service that connects financial institutions around the world.
In a statement Wednesday, SWIFT said “Diplomatic decisions taken by the European Union, in consultation with the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, bring SWIFT into efforts to end this crisis by requiring us to disconnect select Russian banks from our financial messaging services. As previously stated, we will fully comply with applicable sanctions laws,” they wrote.
The statement went on to say, “To this end, in compliance with the legal instruction in EU Council Regulation (EU) 2022/345 of 1 March 2022, we will disconnect seven designated Russian entities (and their designated Russia based subsidiaries) from the SWIFT network. This Regulation requires us to disconnect the identified entities on 12 March 2022, and we will do so accordingly. The SWIFT community will be kept regularly updated across multiple channels, including in the customer section on swift.com.”
On Wednesday in a statement the Council of the EU said the Russian banks removed from SWIFT are Bank Otkritie, Novikombank, Promsvyazbank, Rossiya Bank, Sovcombank, VNESHECONOMBANK (VEB), and VTB BANK.
The United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada said in a joint statement on Saturday warned they would disconnect "selected" Russian banks from SWIFT in order to punish Russia for invading its neighbor.
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