Switzerland Today
Greetings from Bern,
The events in Ukraine continue to dominate Swiss headlines. The big news, announced this afternoon, is that neutral Switzerland will adopt European Union sanctions against Russians involved in the invasion of Ukraine and freeze their assets, in a sharp deviation from the country’s traditions.
In the news: In the largest demo for peace seen in Switzerland for 20 years (pictured), up to 20,000 people marched through Bern at the weekend against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
- Ukrainian flags and flags for peace dominated the scene. There was applause for speakers who shouted, among other things, “No to Putin’s war, no to all wars” and “Not one franc to the aggressor”. The crowd jeered and whistled the Swiss government.
- Lucerne FestivalExternal link, one of the world’s top classical music festivals, today cancelled the concerts by the Mariinsky Orchestra and Valery Gergiev, who has ties to Putin, scheduled for August 21-22. “In view of Russia’s acts of war in violation of international law, we are sending a clear signal of solidarity to the people of Ukraine,” it said.
- In other news, Swiss Re, one of the world’s biggest reinsurers, took a combined hit of more than $4 billion (CHF3.7 billion) last year from the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of natural catastrophes.
After some widely criticised soul-searching, the Swiss government today backtracked on its previous stance and decided to adopt the full range of sanctions imposed by the European Union against Russia.
Neutral Switzerland had previously declined to freeze the assets of Russian individuals and companies. But the government has now decided that such a stance is no longer compatible with preserving its neutrality in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
Ignazio Cassis, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, called Russia’s invasion of Ukraine an “attack on sovereignty, freedom, democracy and the population and institutions of a free country”, which also affected Switzerland. “Playing into the hands of an aggressor is not neutral,” he added.
Switzerland will now block the assets of 363 individuals and four corporate entities. This includes Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In addition, it banned five unnamed oligarchs close to Putin from entering the country.
Switzerland also followed suit with other European countries in closing its airspace to Russian flights.
Defence Minister Viola Amherd said Switzerland was bracing itself for retaliatory measures by Russia. “Specifically, we’re thinking of areas such as energy supply, refugee flows and cyberattacks,” she said.
Options for adapting to global warming are at the heart of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, published today.The report outlines the repercussions of rising emissions and temperatures on ecosystems and human societies, particularly in cities, and emphasises adaptation measures.
“There is clear and growing evidence that the impacts of climate change on humans and nature are very serious and affect us all,” Thomas Bernauer, professor of political science at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich and one of the report’s authors, told SWI swissinfo.ch.
“For example, water scarcity is increasing in many regions of the world. There are more landslides, more floods, more droughts, more extreme weather events, more biodiversity losses. These are not random events, but the clear consequences of global warming.”
Bernauer is concerned that adaptation efforts around the world are not keeping pace with increasing climate risk, what’s known as an adaptation gap. A big adaptation gap is unsurprisingly observed in poorer countries and countries that are poorly governed, but this gap also appears in rich democracies such as Switzerland.
“In the Alps, for example, the average temperature is increasing faster than the global average. We can’t just stabilise mountain slopes or use concrete, steel and rocks to protect against increasingly extreme weather events and floods. It also takes massive efforts in urban planning, adapting agricultural practices, and making energy and transportation infrastructure less vulnerable to climatic risks. All this will take decades,” he says.
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