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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

The flow of money seems to be one major battleground in this war.

The biggest sanctions so far are disallowing to exchange funds with some russian banks. And the "nuclear option" is to disallow Russia from using the SWIFT system.

What are the chances that this conflict will completely change how trading is done between countries?

Could the USA, Europe, South Korea etc simply "nullify" all Russian holdings of their currency? I guess it is just some numbers on computers the respective countries have control over?

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Kicking them out of SWIFT would hurt but China built an alternative system called CIPS. It’s nowhere near as big but it out there. But if China and Russia both used CIPS more then that would threaten the US dollar’s power as the global reserve currency.

It would also sour China's trade relationships with the rest of the world. The US is China's biggest export market at $452 billion a year, with Russia trailing at just $50B a year. If China decided to ally with Russia - or help them get around the sanction - it would decimate China's economy as well: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/exports-by-country

Russia is an economically weak state; it's not in China's interests to help them.

> If China decided to ally with Russia - or help them get around the sanction - it would decimate China's economy as well:

The US and EU also heavily depend on China. Russia is not thrown out of SWIFT for a full-on war; I highly doubt that there will be sanctions to a more important trade partner that massively hurt the EU and US themselves for merely supporting Russia.

For trade between China and Russia, why wouldn't they just do it via Yuan and Rubel? What does a new system like CIPS bring to the table here?

Because the strategic goal for China and Russia is to establish a stable, long-term alternative to US hegemony. The invasion of Ukraine is a demonstration of independent will.

There is going to be nothing to stop China and the USSR from doing this for exactly that reason. At this point the only thing you can do is temporarily inconvenience them, since they’ll get off SWIFT as soon as possible anyway.

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