In the last few days, the Russians have been making bellicose threats about what might happen if they are excluded from SWIFT. On Friday, the CEO of Russia’s second largest bank said,
If there is no Swift, there is no banking . . . relationship, it means that the countries are on the verge of war, or they are definitely in a cold war. … The next day, the Russian and American ambassadors would have to leave the capitals.
On Tuesday, Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, expanded on this theme, saying
We’ll watch developments and if such decisions [to restrict access to SWIFT] are made, I want to note that our economic reaction and generally any other reaction will be without limits.
Senior government officials are very careful in their choice of language. When Medvedev says that (a) the reaction will not only be an economic one, and (b) that it will be “without limits” he is suggesting that Russia might treat any blocking of Russian banks’ access to SWIFT as justifying a very serious escalation on Russia’s part. To be clear — Russia would not engage in nuclear hostilities if it were frozen out of SWIFT. More likely, Medvedev is suggesting that Russia would move from its current stance of passive hostility to the West to a combination of specific retaliations (perhaps through manipulating gas supplies to Western Europe) with a far more active hostility of the kind that it displayed before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Read the full op-ed at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:01/28/2015