https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/26/russia-central-bank-white-house/

The Biden administration, Canada, and European allies vowed Saturday to remove certain Russian financial institutions from SWIFT, which is a key part of the global banking system, and also impose major restrictions on Russia’s central bank, a dramatic escalation of the coordinated effort to punish the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine.

In the joint statement, the U.S. and its allies said “we commit to imposing restrictive measures that will prevent the Russian Central Bank from deploying its international reserves in ways that undermine the impact of our sanctions.”

Russia’s central bank has more than $640 billion in foreign exchange reserves, much of it held in the computers of western central banks in cities such as New York, London, and Frankfurt. The effort to freeze or quarantine that money is likely to put tremendous pressure on Russia, one of the world’s largest economies

Michael S. Bernstam, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said if Washington and other governments impose full and immediate sanctions on Russia’s central bank it would be not only the single-most impactful financial sanction, but the only sanction, in his view, that could get Moscow to stand down.