Russian Cutoff From Banking Backbone Said to Be Ruled Out
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The U.S. and its European allies have ruled out for now barring Russia from a core part of the international banking-payment system because it would cause too much collateral damage, officials familiar with the matter said.
Republican U.S. senators including John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida, seeking harsher penalties over the Ukraine conflict, want Russia ousted from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, the Belgium-based hub for financial transactions used by more than 10,000 institutions. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has said “there is a logic” to barring Russia from the system, known as SWIFT, as two dozen Iranian banks were in 2012.