Switzerland and Russia clash on value of OSCE

Contrasting positions of Cassis (left) and Lavrov on the OSCE. Keystone-SDA

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is the most important institution for supporting the peace process in Ukraine, said its chair, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis, during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on Friday. Lavrov described the organisation as being in crisis.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

“I don’t want to remind you of the position of my country, Switzerland, on the war in Ukraine. It’s well known,” Cassis told Lavrov. “I am here at the OSCE to open doors.”

“We believe that this organisation is the most important one for accompanying a peace process,” he said during the interview broadcast by Swiss public broadcaster RTS.

Earlier, Lavrov described the OSCE as an organisation in “deep crisis” and at risk of “self-destruction”. “I won’t even go into the details of how the OSCE found itself in the current situation and was faced with a real threat of self-destruction,” he said, according to the Russian agency Ria Novosti.

+ Swiss-chaired OSCE has ‘little hope’ of brokering Ukraine peace

Political deadlock

The meeting between the two men is the second stage of the diplomatic offensive launched by Cassis as part of the Swiss chairmanship of the OSCE. He visited Kyiv on Monday.

Cassis had expressed his intention to play a mediating role in the peace process in Ukraine at the World Economic Forum (WEF). However, the organisation has been facing a political deadlock for several years. The rift between Russia and the other states has widened, and the United States is pressing for cuts in the organisation’s funding.

The end of the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for nearly four years, has not yet been decided. Talks bringing together Russians and Ukrainians have been launched in Abu Dhabi in recent weeks at the initiative of the United States. Few tangible results have yet been announced. Diplomatic efforts to find a solution to the conflict have been stymied for months by the question of territory.

Adapted from French by AI/ts

How we work 

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail]