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Comment by xenocratus | Hacker News Reader

I'm way too far away from power on anything like this so I might be terribly wrong, but I imagine that cutting off SWIFT might convince other countries doing bad things to consider adhering to Russia's system, if they see the West willing to cut them off as well. You then get fragmentation and SWIFT losing some of its "soft power".

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Russia already uses multiple alternative settlement systems with China, Iran, and few other buddies like Norko, and Belarus.

> You then get fragmentation and SWIFT losing some of its "soft power".

This already lost any power it had in 2014, because the threat of disconnection was wasted.

An honestly, EU lost its face now to talk "soft power." Every foreign head of state going to meet EU bureaucrats will now look at them, and think "can I rely on these people who threw out every treaty for a want of sleeping without a blanket?"

It's still an effective sanction because the Russian alternative is a half baked approach. It can only handle a fraction of the daily required transactions, only 40% of Russian banks are signed up to use it and it can only process payments during office hours.

Processing only during office hours? That's hilarious. Is there someone manually debugging transactions, and that's the reason?

Russia, I think, has 11 timezones. So essentially it is office hours entire day.

Moscow office hours

To be fair, it's not only heating. It's power plants and gas to keep many factories working. Think about ovens of all sorts and all industrial processes that need a lot of electricity. But yes, it's the n-th loss of face of EU. It's not much about EU bureaucrats but about EU head of states, prime ministers, etc. which ultimately decide what bureaucrats do. On the other side of the ocean, if the USA let Putin go too far they risk losing part of their empire [1] which is always bad for business.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire#Present

I'm not satisfied at all with Europe response so far, but i might be missing something here.

> can I rely on these people who threw out every treaty for a want of sleeping without a blanket?

Why isn't the US sending troops? Because the risk of escalation and nukes are unacceptable. In case you forgot, Europe also has nuclear powers and the risk of escalation is higher if the EU as an organization openly acts on more then soft power.

And as far as i know, only the US and the UK are ignoring a treaty to offer security to Ukraine.

Again, I'm not satisfied with the response so far, but what exactly are you suggesting so that EU bureaucrats don't lose their credibility?

> Because the risk of escalation and nukes are unacceptable.

He can lob a nuke right now, but he knows he will lose against the US.

He will retreat to avoid an even bigger defeat.

Thugs I fought in my teenage years, even when they brought a knife to the fight, when they are afraid of getting KOed, and humiliated in front of their peers, they wrap up, and leave.

They don't want to get beaten up, risk humiliation, and potentially committing murder at the same time.

Similarly, US can give Russian state 2 choices, a defeat with orderly surrender, or end like Yugoslavia, but 10 times worse.

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