@Mirai
I did a quick search to try and find the list, and found the following article. It seems that not only are they closing SWIFT for certain banks they will also be bringing in sanctions against the Russian Central Bank. That's probably a bigger deal than any removal from SWIFT.
News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication
www.ft.com
Western leaders sanction Russia central bank and cut some lenders from Swift
The US and western allies will place sanctions on the Russian central bank and remove some Russian banks from the Swift global payments system, in the harshest response to the Ukraine invasion.
In a joint statement, the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the European Commission said they would “prevent the Russian central bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions”.
“We will hold Russia to account and collectively ensure that this war is a strategic failure for Putin,” they added.
The group said they would take more measures against enablers of the invasion, including limiting the sale of “golden passports” that “let wealthy Russians connected to the Russian government become citizens of our countries and gain access to our financial systems”.
Ursula von der Leyen said she would propose to EU leaders that they should “paralyse the assets of Russia’s central bank” in order to freeze its transactions and make it impossible for it to liquidate its assets.
The joint action is the harshest measure imposed on Russia over its
invasion of Ukraine. The US has previously only imposed sanctions on the central banks of Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.
A senior US banking executive said putting sanctions on the central bank was one of many options that the Biden administration had discussed with leading US financial groups in recent weeks to make sure banks were prepared for the possibility.
Josh Lipsky, a former IMF adviser now at the Atlantic Council think-tank, said earlier the US imposing sanctions on the Russian central bank would be an “extraordinarily significant and damaging move to the Russian economy”.
“A G20 central bank has never been sanctioned before. This is not Iran. This is not Venezuela. So to shut off their central bank from the international financial system, or at least the dollar and euro economy, is a massively destabilising move potentially,” said Lipsky.
Edward Fishman, a former US official now at the Center for a New American Security, said it would present a “devastating blow” to the Russian economy that would eclipse the significance of a ban on Swift.
“If you added the Russian central bank to the SDN list, it would be the single most impactful sanction that you could apply to Russia, and you could do it with a stroke of the pen,” he said. “It would render a sizeable chunk of their foreign exchange reserves unusable overnight.”
A ban would prohibit US entities from doing any dealings with the central bank. That would mean everyone in the world would be “skittish about moving any assets on behalf of the Russian central bank”, Fishman explained.
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