The exit of Russia from the SWIFT payment system will occur only if the EU takes strict sanctions against the country. Such a condition called the head of VTB Andrei Kostin in an interview with HandelsBlatt.
He believes that this will never happen if European governments wanted to take tough measures against Russia. “But so far there are no such plans even in the USA. They would prefer to cut us from the dollar system and introduce secondary sanctions against European banks to prevent them from working with us,” Kostin noted.
The head of VTB added that previously introduced US limits for sovereign debt did not become a problem for Russia. The importance of international banks for Russian government bonds is relatively small, he believes. “Only VTB owns the shares comparable to the share of investors from the United States, and if necessary, we can buy even more,” Costin explained.
He is also confident that political dispute cannot be solved by economic sanctions, and the United States and Russia are already in a state of a new cold war. “If the West does not want to work with us, we will work with China, India and African countries. USA and Europe is not the whole world,” the top manager sat down.
European countries can keep Russia from aggression, if you contradict the disconnection from SWIFT. To make such a step offered a previously former senior adviser to the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Maximilian Terkhalle.