On Tuesday, March 1, 2022, the European Commission published a list of Russian banks to be excluded from the SWIFT payment system. The step of excluding Russian banks from SWIFT has been widely supported by EU citizens, as they find it one of the few efficient sanctions against Russia that can potentially cut off financial streams funding Russian invasion to Ukraine.

We consider excluding just a part of the banks from SWIFT as a bad compromise that does not work. Everyone knows that such a restriction can be easily worked around by setting up a new account in the bank that is not on the list.

We blame EU Commission for negotiating such a bad compromise and the German government for lobbing for this kind of compromise due to German dependency on Russian gas.

We ask for immediate exclusion of all Russian banks from the SWIFT system, not just some of them. We, citizens of EU, understand that costs connected to this step may be enormous. But we also understand that freedom has its price. We believe that this price is still a fraction what Ukraine is paying now for our freedom on daily basis.

In addition, we also ask for excluding all Belarusian banks from SWIFT since Belarus is an accomplice of Russia in invasion to Ukraine.