When Russian banks were cut off from SWIFT in 2022, the goal was clear: deliver a fast financial shock. It didn’t quite work that way. Russia kept exporting, oil revenues surged and before long a different narrative began to take hold — that the sanctions had not worked after all.
That conclusion is easy to reach. But it misses what was actually happening. At the center of that story was Russia’s ...
Steelman: The article presents a compelling case that building an alternative financial system is much easier than building an equivalent. In the case of Russia and SPFS, the domestic platform operated within national borders but failed to recreate the wider ecosystem that gives global networks their real value, such as scale, trust, legal predictability, and network reach. This illustrates the challenges countries face when trying to replace an existing financial infrastructure.
Patterns detect...