Swiss peace conferences: no business like show business

It is reminiscent of the emperor’s new clothes: the court applauds the “peace summit” – and the media avoids plain language.

For Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis and Defense Minister Viola Amherd, Ukraine seems to be something like the last bulwark of the democratic West against the Hun storm. And President Volodymyr Zelensky plays the Winkelried (the hero of the Battle of Sempach in 1386) for freedom and democracy. Shouldn’t the Swiss Federal Council have already heard that friend Volodymyr has opposition journalists, high-ranking officials, and politicians shot without further ado if they are classified as “traitors”?
  Even delegates on a diplomatic mission like Denis Kireev, who represented the government in Kiev at the negotiations in Istanbul in spring 2022, were “shot while fleeing” by the Ukrainian secret service. Kireev was shot because there were “doubts” about his loyalty. In Kiev, such doubts are eliminated with a shot in the head.

Whom does the
Swiss Federal Council trust?

The Federal Council apparently has complete trust in a government whose secret service painted a living man with pig’s blood and photographed him as a corpse in order to fake a Russian assassination. Swiss foreign policy seems to have lost its compass in the ideological ground fog. A “peace conference” is being celebrated in Kehrsatz, and people never tire of emphasising that “security experts” from more than 80 countries took part. Except, of course, Russia and China. There is no presentable final statement from the conference because many of the participants do not understand Ukrainian President Zelensky’s loss of reality. Still, they act very important and immediately announce that Switzerland is working on another “global peace summit” at the highest level.
  The Zurich newspaper “Tages-Anzeiger” opens with the title “Switzerland wants to win over China for a peace summit”. Confidence is exuded there on a double page, only at the bottom left of this double page is a small short message: The Kremlin spokesman calls the exercise “useless” if Russia is not there. The Russian ambassador in Bern later said that Switzerland had “completely lost its role as an impartial international mediator”.
  From Russia’s point of view, Switzerland has become a party to the war, but this is persistently obscured and denied. In the daily talk on SRF radio, Gabriel Lüchinger, head of the International Security Department at the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs FDFA, said that Switzerland had maintained its neutrality: “Switzerland did not take part in the alliance against Russia”.

Swiss Russia bashing

So, Switzerland is not part of the anti-Russia alliance, and the earth is flat. In fact, Moscow does not accept Switzerland as an intermediary because the government in Bern has accepted all the sanctions intended to ruin the Russian economy, as Brussels and Washington constantly demand. The Swiss judiciary is persecuting Russian citizens in a legally questionable way and is supported to the best of its ability by leading Swiss media, which calls for the hunt for everything Russian.
  If a constitutional state claiming this designation expropriates assets, it must prove that they were acquired unlawfully, which would require lengthy investigations with uncertain prospects of success. The claim that the right to private property does not apply to Russian businessmen, because they are “close” to or support the government in Moscow, is an absurd legal construct. Swiss law does not allow criminal prosecution for political opinions or partisanship, except where these are explicitly defined as a violation of the law (e. g., racism articles).
  But leaving aside the dubious effectiveness of these sanctions aimed at ruining Russia, even the alleged political “closeness of the oligarchs to Moscow” is in most cases a fantasy. The banker Josef Ackermann said in an interview at the end of December: “Do the oligarchs have any influence on Putin? He doesn’t care at all what the oligarchs think. I know this because I sat on Viktor Vekselberg’sRenova board of directors for several years”.

Signs of mass psychosis

But you can no longer expect logic or rationality of this kind. When it comes to Ukraine, signs of mass psychosis are visible. The mentality of collective punishment, which has been extended to the whole of Russia, has also spread in Switzerland with a fury that does not stop at Russian tennis players, opera singers or Russian literature. And brave journalists claim from their warm office chairs that the Ukrainians will fight to the last blood drop. These are mostly the same journalists who had been predicting a Ukrainian offensive and a major “breakthrough” for months. And these are the same people who are now diligently discussing every day whether the production of grenades can be increased and how many million grenades it would take to help Ukraine win.
  Since even the new cold warriors now seem to suspect that the war against Russia cannot be won with a material battle, they are trying to use television images as symbols of perseverance. The hug with which the Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio received his friend Volodymyr at the airport, his warm welcome by the party presidents (except the Swiss Popular Party, SVP), the standing ovation for a video of Zelensky in the National Council last June (without the SVP), and all this flag-waving expression of emotions: There are no more impressive PR photos to show which side the Confederation has taken in this war.

The trained actor Zelensky

The trained actor Zelensky, who was featured in the Pandora Papers, where it was revealed how he obtained his offshore millions under dubious circumstances, is celebrated as a hero of freedom by the majority of the Swiss political class. The man who has banned negotiations with the Russian head of state by decree, fantasises about a “peace plan” that ultimately envisages the total surrender of the Russians. According to Zelensky, the Russian government should be brought before a war crimes tribunal. And it is precisely this Volodymyr Zelensky that the Swiss government ties itself to, organising a “peace conference” in Davos, where it supports the fantasist’s demands.
  That goes too far even for the tabloid “Blick”, which has not exactly stood out as a fourth power critical of the government during the Corona period. “Switzerland is losing its role as a mediator,” headlines the Ringier paper. The fact that Bern is deviating from its traditional role is “a delicate game”. 

Ignorance of the prehistory of the war

Was the Federal Council unable to find out anything about the prehistory of the war in Ukraine?
  “Without Ukraine, Russia is no longer a great Eurasian power,” wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former security advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, a quarter of a century ago in his famous book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives”. Brzezinski saw Ukraine as the most important pivotal country that the US had to bring under its control in order to secure US global dominance, while preventing a Eurasian economic area from Vladivostok to Lisbon from falling under the leadership of Russia.
  Does the Federal Council lack this knowledge of history? Even Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia partly manipulated by Western political and economic power groups, admits that the war in Ukraine did not start in February 2022. It literally says: “The War in Donbass is an armed conflict in the Donets Basin in eastern Ukraine starting in 2014, which represents the initial phase of the broader Russian-Ukrainian war”.
  If one sets aside the long history of internal conflict in Ukraine, the war began when the democratically elected government in Kiev was overthrown with the open help of the USA, and armed right-wing extremist groups took control of the protest demonstration on the Maidan. The fighting escalated into open war after the newly installed puppet government in Kiev launched the military “anti-terror operation” against the autonomists in Donbass and Crimea on 14 April 2014. When Russia attacked in 2022, western Ukraine had been shelling eastern Ukraine for eight years, and Russian-backed insurgents in Donbas had been firing back for eight years.

Simplistic perpetrator-victim narrative
in the Ukraine war is a fiction

If this can be read even in relevant encyclopaedias, why has the Swiss government, with all its intelligence services and experts, not carefully examined the events? If Switzerland had done that, it would have come to the conclusion that the simplistic perpetrator-victim narrative in the Ukraine war is a fiction, and that the incessant assertion that Russia “invaded Ukraine” in February 2022 because Putin wanted to restore the Soviet Union, or the Tsarist Empire, is complete nonsense.
  With its refusal to respond to Russian demands for a European security structure, NATO shares responsibility for this war. It even sabotaged peace negotiations that were well advanced in the spring of 2022, a few weeks after the Russian attack. Participants in the negotiations at the time, such as former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet and Zelensky’s ex-government spokesman Oleksiy Arestovych, have confirmed this.
  Has the Swiss Federal Council read the study by the RAND Corporation, the most important US military-strategic think tank, which outlined in 2019 what should be done to destroy Russia? Did the Federal Council notice the violence that right-wing extremist militias inflicted on the Russian-speaking population in the east of the country in the spring of 2014? Has the Federal Council registered that the Zelensky government has largely banned opposition media?

Systematic propaganda

Has the Federal Council ever noticed that the Zelensky government is systematically lying and producing propaganda, such as that of human rights commissioner Lyudmylla Denisova, who claimed that she had evidence that Russian soldiers were raping small children?
  You must ask yourself whether Ignazio Cassis and his employees have  sources of information other than the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”. Its editor-in-chief writes: “The USA and its allies want stability and peace. The revisionist powers Russia, China and Iran want chaos” (18 November 2023).
  So, peace or chaos, with this biblical formula the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” simplistically, and incorrectly, summarises world politics. For some, the world is apparently black and white, shades of grey are unknown.
  Arthur Ponsonby, British State official, politician and pacifist, published his book “Falsehood in War-time” in 1928, in which he states that from 1914 to 1918 there must have been “more lies in the world than in any other period in world history”. Many things today are reminiscent of 1914.

The public debate
resembles a masquerade ball

The public debate is like a masquerade ball, where many politicians and journalists do not dare to take off their masks and state harshly: We see that the emperor is naked and this Cassis-Amherd peace plan is bullshit. But since, as the Spanish saying goes, you can’t cover the sun with a finger, it takes a lot of effort to camouflage and soften reality as best you can. One avoids harsh and sober judgments: “Perhaps we should be a little more modest, more realistic,” says former OSCE diplomat Toni Frisch cautiously on Swiss radio. Perhaps. Although it has long been clear to Frisch: “Nobody expects a peace treaty to be signed at the end of this conference.” So, a peace conference that is nothing but hot air. But no one dares to say that.

Swiss diplomacy has to be
careful that it does not get into
the tradition of absurd theatre

Former Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy Rey is quoted in the Zurich newspaper “Tages-Anzeiger” as saying, with an air of indulgent mildness, that “the diplomatic maneuvers” are “currently still abstract” and that Mr Cassis is now under “some pressure to be able to show specific results after the announcements”.
  As far as the specifics are concerned, Foreign Minister Cassis himself informs the daily news Tagesschau about his next global peace conference: “I immediately started holding these talks, together with my diplomats around the world. Of course, I’m not allowed to say anything more.”
  And Defense Minister Amherd says she was “able to talk to various heads of state about the planned peace conference” and that she “broadly received only positive responses.”
  In the absurd play “Ubu Roi” (1896), the king wields a toilet brush as a sceptre. Swiss diplomacy must be careful not to fall into the tradition of absurd theatre.  •

First published: globalbridge.ch of 24 January 2024, reprinted with the author’s kind permission.

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Helmut Scheben (*1947 in Koblenz, Germany) was a press agency reporter and correspondent for print media in Mexico and Central America from 1980 to 1985. From 1986 he was editor of the Wochenzeitung (WoZ) in Zurich, from 1993 to 2012 he was editor and reporter on Swiss television SRF, including 16 years on the Tagesschau.