The European Union member countries have reached an agreement to exclude several Russian banks from the SWIFT Interbank network. On the other hand, the banking subsidiary of the gas giant Gazprom was not targeted in the ban by the European Union, AFP reports.
According to the report, European Union member states took the decision on Tuesday to exclude several Russian banks from the Swift Interbank network system, the system for transferring financial information.
The affected Russian banks are: VTB Bank PJSC, Bank Rossiya, Bank Otkritie, Novikombank, Promsvyazbank PJSC, Sovcombank PJSC and VEB.RF.
However, two names are missing from this list. The first is Gazprombank, the country’s third-largest bank and above all a subsidiary of the Russian gas giant Gazprom. Its absence is not a mystery: several countries including Germany feared that they could no longer be supplied with gas. Trade can therefore continue, the report added.
The Europeans have also decided to spare the country’s leading bank, Sberbank and its 110 million customers, which has many ramifications in Europe. On Monday, the European Central Bank (ECB) warned of the risk of bankruptcy of several European subsidiaries of Sberbank.
Representatives of member states in Brussels also approved the ban on Europeans participating in projects co-financed by the Russian sovereign fund RDIF, the French EU presidency said in a tweet.
The measures of this new package of sanctions against Russia will come into force on Wednesday after the publication of the decision in the Official Journal of the EU, which will specify the names of the banks concerned.
The Western allies announced on Saturday that they wanted to exclude Russian banks from the SWIFT Interbank network system, so as to inflict on Moscow “costs that will further isolate it from the international financial system and our economies”.