 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In the most recent set of sanctions against Russia, the United States and European Union have decided to remove a number of Russian banks from SWIFT. SWIFT stands for Society for World Wide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It is a secure global messaging network used by banks for making international transactions. More than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries use the SWIFT system for carrying out transactions. Over 40 million messages are sent through the network daily, facilitating the exchange of trillions of dollars. Russia carries out much of its oil and gas trade with other countries through SWIFT. You know, if you look at the SWIFT system, it's really the way that communication is done between banks. And if we have a bank which is to transact business with another bank, then they both communicate through the SWIFT system and it has become de facto what almost all banks are using. This of course gives the possibility that if the Western powers and the US wants to sanction any entity or any country for the matters or the country's banks, then the SWIFT becomes a very convenient mechanism because all transactions between banks are using the SWIFT system for communicating. SWIFT is based in Belgium. It is overseen by central banks from 11 industrial countries including the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, etc. But it is not the only financial messaging system. The other systems are also available. So it's not that the SWIFT is actually the only way to sanction or there are no ways for people to bypass the SWIFT system for transacting if they do it through any other communication system. As long as those entities also do not get sanctioned, almost 95 to 98 percent of all transactions go through the SWIFT system internationally. The alternative systems which are there, there is a European one, that the Chinese one and the Russian one do not have to really seen much of heft, they haven't really seen much of transactions. So this is one part of it, but it's not the only sanctions. There are of course the major part of the sanctions which is targeting the central bank. Now the central bank is not just a bank. It holds essentially, for instance the Fed in the United States holds dollars and if any country wants to have dollars for instance, it in fact will then hold it with the federal bank. Now Russia has a very strong foreign exchange reserve position. So sanctioning the central bank means that those reserves that it has, which is in foreign currency either euro or in dollars, can then be frozen. Now this has never happened in the history of sanctions, that a country of this size, an economy of this size has been sanctioned, its central bank has been sanctioned. So we are into uncharted territory, but what is that Russia can do is an open question. It is possible, they could seize for instance considering this to be appropriation, they could seize the assets that other countries have in Russia. One issue which the European powers have sought a carve out is that Europe could still buy, European Union could still buy gas from Russia and pay for it. So not all banks, all Russian banks have been thrown out of the swift system, so that Russia could still maintain some transactions and get dollars. Now if Russia stops those transactions, doesn't give European Union gas, then what happens is an open question, but given the fact that Russia's external account has been hit so hard, it's possible that Russia may not take that route immediately. But these are effectively what are we called not completely nuclear sanctions, but in the way they are looking it could become that essentially they become nuclear sanctions on the Russian economy, in which case we do not know what happens to the global economic system. So it's not an easy situation that we are in. Yes Russia is going to face a lot of turbulence on its external account, but can whether this have made the economy sanction proof, this is something that we have to see.