According to the New York Times, the European Union’s plan to exclude some large Russian banks from SWIFT will not target Sberbank or Gazprombank, Russia’s largest and third-largest banks, respectively. That’s a little like sanctioning U.S.-based social-media companies — but not Facebook and Twitter.
There is a very strong and humane desire to make these sanctions as surgical as possible, but sanctions that narrow are not going to get the job done. They’d be better off targeting every financial institution with a Russian mailing address. The Biden administration should convince our European allies that what they propose is far too little.