Andrey Kostin, photographed during a lunch at the FT this afternoon. One of Russia’s top bankers on Friday warned that excluding the country from the Swift banking payment system would be tantamount to “war”. The suggestion that Russia could be shut out of Swift triggered widespread alarm in Moscow’s financial community when it was floated by western politicians last summer. Russia’s banks rely heavily on the Belgium-based payments system for both domestic and international payments. However, the move was at the time considered too punitive a sanction, being described by one adviser as “the nuclear option”. Speaking at a panel in Davos on Friday Andrei Kostin, chief executive of VTB , Russia’s second-largest bank, said: “If there is no Swift, there is no banking . . . relationship, it means that the countries are on the verge of war, or they are definitely in a cold war.” “The next day, the Russian and […]