President Biden announced new sanctions on Russian banks in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, but declined to make good on his threat to sanction Vladimir Putin directly or to cut Russia off from the international banking system entirely.
“We’ve now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold around $1 trillion in assets,” Biden told reporters at the White House. Biden noted that the U.S. had already cut off Russia’s largest bank from the U.S. financial system.
“And today, we’re also blocking four more major banks. That means every asset they have in America will be frozen,” Biden said.
Among the newly-sanctioned banks is VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank with $250 billion in assets.
However, the U.S. did not cut Russian access to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT system. Managed by the National Bank of Belgium, most international business transactions are conducted via the SWIFT system.
“The sanctions that we’ve proposed on all their banks are of equal consequence, maybe more consequence, than SWIFT, number one. Number two, it is always an option, but right now, that’s not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take,” Biden said when asked why SWIFT sanctions weren’t included in the new package.
Ukraine has called to disconnect Russia from SWIFT in response to the invasion.
“We demand the disconnection of Russia from SWIFT, the introduction of a no-fly zone over Ukraine and other effective steps to stop the aggressor,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said in a Twitter post.
Russian forces have invaded Ukraine from the east, south, and from Belarus to the north. Russia has captured the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as well as an airport outside the capital city of Kyiv.
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