EU considering SWIFT exclusion for Belarus banks

The European Union is considering excluding banks in Belarus from the SWIFT messaging system that underpins the global financial transactions, as it has already done for seven Russian banks, an EU official said on Thursday.

“On the SWIFT side, we’re also looking now at the preparation of the equivalents for the Belarus financial sector, but knowing that SWIFT is not as strategically important in the Belarus economy as it is in the Russian side,” the official said.