The Russian authorities still express thoughts about phasing out imports. Cheese analogues, shrimps labelled as hailing from Belarus, all-inclusive vacation packages in Anapa and of course the Russian copy of the SWIFT network.

Starting from sanctions imposing against some Russian officials and state establishments, everyone was talking about the necessity to launch a unique payment system. Meanwhile, it is supposed to be as big as SWIFT which is “an authorized network of information exchange between banks. The system comprises 10,000 enterprises from 209 countries, including 600 from Russia.” And then a long-awaited miracle has happened. Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Russia’s central bank, said that Russia was ready to disconnect from SWIFT or to other restrictions. “We have put the finishing touches to our payment system and if something unexpected occurs all the operations in SWIFT format will work, as we have elaborated such an analogue,” Nabiullina noted. Unfortunately, there is no other information about the Russian solution. It exists and that is the key point. There is no need to know additional information. Even the name of the analogue is not announced. For onlookers it seems that the Russians “have developed their own Internet” and they can do “in this Internet” whatever they like.

There were several similar inventions in the Russian banking sector which was not ready for sanctions. It should be noted that when sanctions against Russia were imposed, Visa and MasterCard stopped operating the cards issued by some Russian banks. Thus, Mir, Russia’s payment system was introduced. We should hope that one day an analogue of the sustainable economic growth and people’s wealth will be invented.