This is a great overview. They seem to be implying that banks that are otherwise not required to abide by sanctions (say, one located in China) can easily bypass SWIFT restrictions and transact with the affected Russian banks directly. How true is this part in practice? I'm going to ignore the last bit since that is tangential to the topic and ripe for starting a flame war.
> can easily bypass SWIFT restrictions and transact with the affected Russian banks directly “Easily” is the squishy bit here. If they’re settling in dollars, probably not, unless someone’s carting around paper dollars. (This has been done.) If they’re settling in rubles or yuan, for most definitions of “easily,” yes.
Why does settling in dollars make any difference? Like he said, if the SWIFT secure messaging service goes down, someone at a bank in Japan has the phone number of someone at a bank in New York and can "wire" money with a phone call instead of sending a SWIFT message. Wires will be orders of magnitude slower, but money is not frozen. And the real effect is that someone in Mumbai receiving a phone call from a Russian bank today will be especially careful to cross every T and dot every I.