Leaders in the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran are developing an alternative to the SWIFT system for messaging for international payments, according to a key Iranian diplomat in comments made on Thursday. On the subject, Iranian ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali told reporters, “We are making efforts in this direction,” according to the Russian RIA Novosti news agency. SWIFT, an acronym for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a system that allows for communication between financial institutions to facilitate international transfers of money. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month, the international community scrambled to cut off Russia from this system, hoping that so doing would strangulate the nation’s economy in retribution for the war. Several, though not all, Russian financial institutions were denied access to the SWIFT system in the ensuing weeks, effectively barring these banks from international transactions. Since 2014, Russia has been developing …