Possible chain of payment from my understanding.
First off, SWIFT is a transaction messaging system, not a trade system. It sends a message (like an email) from one account to another. The sending account will deduce amount X, and receiving account increase by X. What the receiver does to the sender next is another story, can be done in other forms and through another channel, not necessarily via SWIFT. CIPS can be that alternative, or physical gold.
SWIFT has not cut some Russian banks off because EU want to buy Russian oil. These Russian banks receive EURO through SWIFT. They can transfer the oil EURO to a Chinese bank connected to SWIFT. The same Chinese bank in term can transfer equivalent amount of RMB to the Russian banks via CIPS according to the exchange rate of Rubel and RMB. Russia can use RMB to buy whatever she want from China or any country that accept RMB via CIPS.
The same thing can be done using the Russian SPFS system as well.
Russia can trade with any country who has access to both SWIFT and CIPS/SPFS.
It is troublesome at the beginning, but once banks have opened their accounts in CIPS or SPFS, everything will be back to normal, as easy as using SWIFT, in terms of doing financial transactions.
Cutting off SWIFT is just a short term annoyance. The long term effect is that both dollar and Euro will loose big chunks of their portions as world reserve currencies. The only beneficiary is RMB.
The real action to hurt Russia is to block Russian exports and imports physical goods. But that is suicidal for the Europeans.
