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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

What you are implying here is that SWIFT ban is not that big of a deal as there are alternatives.

You are probably more educated on this, but I'm an Iranian and Iran was the only country so far that was banned from SWIFT. And it was a very very big deal. The banks could not deal with anywhere in the world and it become very difficult to send or receive money.

The EU tried to setup an alternative to SWIFT [0] so they could work with Iran but it didn't really work out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_in_Support_of_Trade...

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Unlike Iran, Russian banks has not been all disconnected from SWIFT. Only a few banks were. So effect is much smaller. In general, the sanctions on Russia are limited and not strict, the US hasn't gone anywhere as far as it could[0].

[0] https://twitter.com/M_S_Billingslea/status/14984295311951544...

Also, in Iran's case there's the FATF issue which doesn't yet exist regarding Russia.

So basically they are giving time to those that should be affected to move their funds and later when sanctions are increased it will only cause collateral damage.

Oligarchs don't have a ton of cash - the VAST majority of their assets are either in the Russian companies they own majority stakes in (which are down 50-90%) or overseas (which have been frozen and are actively being seized).

It's pretty hard to take all $80Bn from a foreigner. Especially without destroying a lot of value for other people.

> or overseas (which have been frozen and are actively being seized)

Except in the UK, where they fund the tory party so there's very little being done.

???

Boris Johnson has been the most outspoken voice outside Ukraine for increasing sanctions against Russia. He's already announced freezing assets of all Russian banks and 100 other people or corporations,[1] and he led the charge of getting Russia cut off from SWIFT.[2] Germany and Italy were the ones opposing it since they are dependent on Russia for energy.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60515626 [2]: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...

What Boris Johnson says and what Boris Johnson does are two entirely different things.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/u...

This was before any of the recent actions.

I'm a pretty big BoJo hater. But Londongrad existed long before BoJo - don't blame it on him.

So far BoJo has been leading the US and the EU in pretty much every form of support.

It absolutely did, but that's not the point I'm making. I'm pointing out that the oligarchs who fund the tory party don't appear to be under any sanctions at all. From this piece [0] "On Tuesday 22 February, the UK authorities sanctioned three oligarchs and five Russian banks" - all three oligarchs were already heavily sanctioned by the US and basically unable to operate in UK financial markets anyway.

He's sanctioning the ones who aren't funding everything he does, anyone giving him money is still absolutely free to do as they please. Just because that man says he's doing more than anyone else, doesn't mean he is. In fact, it's generally safer to assume truth is the opposite of what he claims publicly.

[0] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-russia-sanctions-ukr...

Some banks lease other banks' tarnsfer mechanisms and I've read official statements that their card infrastructure was also affected.

A big complicating factor there was also the concomitant sanctions by the US and some of their allies. I don't want to imply that I don't think banning SWIFT wasn't important or impactful in either of these cases (it was) - I just wanted to make clear what precisely was happening, as I don't think most reporting was very clear. I'm sorry if it came off otherwise; I appreciate you dropping this comment as I don't want anyone getting the impression that I'm flippantly suggesting that Russia could easily go on with business as usual through alternative means.

> I don't want anyone getting the impression that I'm flippantly suggesting that Russia could easily go on with business as usual through alternative means.

One would obviously hope that the cumulative effects of the various sanctions make it difficult or impossible for Russia to continue with business as usual.

However, part of me worries about the abilities of the oligarch network.

I mean, if you look at the various flight tracking websites. Sure a lot of the commercial aviation traffic has been killed off, but there are still large numbers of private jets floating around in and out of Moscow. How is this possible ? Because the sanctions are only against Russian registered aircraft, and most of those private jets are registered elsewhere and/or are hidden behind charter companies registered elsewhere.

Quite possibly this extends to finance ? I imagine there is potential to find alternative financing routes. It wouldn't be able to last forever, for sure, but might last longer than the West anticipates.

It does to finance as well, however the intent is to also target 2nd and 3th degree actors because it is extremely common to hide the true owner of the money in Finance (tax evasion, sanction evasions, ...)

Here SIGINTEL can contribute a lot but also just better data pooling between the countries and more modern methods of detection.

This international commitment to combat money laundering has so far been lacking but it seems this invasion is giving the momentum needed to put such systems and collaborations in place.

It will still take some time though before it's in place.

In many ways, the oligarch jet movements are a positive sign: they're having to move around (or at least move their assets around) and incur both significant cost and scrutiny in the process. For all you know, a Bermudan registered Gulfstream moving from Monaco to SVO, Moscow, contains a pissed off oligarch watching his lifestyle and investments crumble.

Or, it could be a strategic hedge to ensure he retains control of the jet.

Either way, the sanctions are causing an effect, and by all accounts a significant one. Battles are won or lost by explosives, inexplicably awful things and largely brave men being sacrificed, by their choice or others. Wars are won or lost by economics.

I worry a little that we will test the limits of sanctions. Sanctions kill, yet are often not considered an act of war. We are used to imposing them on countries with little world power or ability to fight back.

If the sanctions are harsh enough, is there potential for a military response?

There's a risk of that if we don't abide by Putin’s demands to back NATO away from its existing positions as well as stopping expansion.

Binary “is there a risk” questions are mostly not useful, because the answer is almost always yes.

> What you are implying here is that SWIFT ban is not that big of a deal as there are alternatives.

I don't think it's so much that, but the UK and US bans on dollar clearance for banking which happened a few days before the SWIFT block actually did 90% of the work that the SWIFT ban is getting the credit for.

It's like turning off the metadata layer two days after putting an axe through the ethernet cable.

SWIFT is a stone-age blockchain. Its messages have non-repudation properties.

The ban makes it much harder to make settlements.

I imagine the idea being that without SWIFT, any bank will require the funds to have actually moved before they are made available.

I didn't get the sense that the author is implying that anything is or is not a big deal. I believe the author was just correcting for a technical audience that can understand it what SWIFT is. As the author said, the media makes it sound like an API for moving money around. There were some other posts on HN about the consequences of misunderstanding what SWIFT was, I recall one person mentioned being assigned a project to "integrate with SWIFT" which turned out upon deeper analysis to be impossible as assigned, because the people handing them the assignment didn't realize what SWIFT actually was and also had the same misconception.

how is crypto scene in iran? with india's recent tax daylight robbery on crypto i am confident that a lot more people will join the informal network of owning and transacting in crypto. if i have to buy 1k worth of BTC or ETH for example, i can imagine paying a friend the cash and getting their wallet in return.

now translate that to international cross-border transactions and we have a bypass. do iranians accept crypto as in other countries (to be fair, even india is far far behind but the recent acceptance by imposing tax is seen in a good light overall)

North Korea is also banned from SWIFT.

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