Daleep Singh, a deputy White House national security adviser, told reporters on Friday that removing Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) banking system will most likely not be a part of initial sanctions if the country invades Ukraine, The Hill reported.
"All options remain on the table. But it's probably not going to be the case that you'll see SWIFT in the initial rollout package," Singh said, regarding the financial transfer organization composed of more than 200 countries and used by over 11,000 financial institutions.
"We have other severe measures we can take that our allies and partners are ready to take in lockstep with us and that don't have the same spillover effects. But we always will monitor these options, and we'll revise our judgments as time goes on," he added.
When reporters pushed back, citing previous comments by the Biden administration indicating a maximum sanction policy, Singh defended the decision not to include Russia's removal from SWIFT.
"I can assure you the measures that we have prepared, the severity of those measures, and the institutions that we would impose them upon, and the immediacy of those sanctions are among the most severe financial sanctions that have ever been contemplated," he said.
Singh also stated that the U.S. is close to completing the first round of sanctions to be imposed if Russia launches a full-scale invasion in Ukraine.
The national security adviser assured the cost to the Russian economy would be "immense."
In the same press briefing on Friday, Deputy National Security Adviser for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger claimed Russia was behind a series of cyberattacks earlier this week against Ukraine's defense ministry and several state-linked banks.
"Russia likes to move in the shadows and counts on a long process of attribution," Neuberger said. "In light of that, we're moving quickly to attribute the DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks. We believe the Russian government is responsible for widespread attacks on Ukrainian banks this week."
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