Russia prepared for 8 years to be cut off from the West. Meet the payment system that’s still processing its credit card transactions

Since the start of the Ukraine War, a barrage of western sanctions has crippled the Russian economy and wreaked havoc on its financial system.

The country has been largely cut off from the international payment system SWIFT, seen its access to $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves restricted, and watched as more than $17 billion in assets were seized from Russian oligarchs.

But for the past eight years, Russia has been preparing for the worst.

In June of 2014, just three months after its…