Editorial about Berset’s meeting with Zelensky: Ukrainians don’t need lectures from us

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On Friday, the Swiss press published a remarkable phrase. It is remarkable that with each repetition it sounds more and more absurd: “Berset declares Selensky’s neutrality.”

On the one hand, the question arises of how to convey to the head of a foreign state a principle that has no fewer interpretations than political parties. But above all: is the Swiss federal president really the right person to explain something to the president of Ukraine, whose fellow citizens must expect to be hit by Russian missiles every day? What does it give a Confederate envoy to lecture a nation that is daily subjected to military terror?

The meeting point was the Republic of Moldova, a small state between Romania and Ukraine that is currently under heavy pressure from Russia and where the heads of European governments met on Thursday for an anti-Putin summit. Russia’s 15-month campaign strengthened the Western alliance, narrowed the transatlantic divide and expanded NATO membership. The political bourgeois Berset, on the other hand, is a government in a corset of diplomatic narrow-mindedness, a seven-member committee in which the Valais woman Viola Amherd tries to use every little leeway – thanks to her commitment, Switzerland can now do without 25 decommissioned tanks; Otherwise, the head of the DDPS has to settle for symbolic politics, such as the call for peace in Times Square two weeks ago.

Maybe Amherd and Berset like each other, maybe otherwise they fight side by side, but in recent days there has been a kind of duel at a distance between two neutral wings in the government: in New York, Amherd is clearly trying, in the Balkans, flexible the skilful tactician Berset, who in March silenced all criticism from the right with his statements against military aid to Kiev.

To save the honor of Berset, it should be noted that the wording according to which he declared Selensky about neutrality did not come from his kitchen. “The conversation was very interesting,” he told SRF about the exchange in Chisinau. It is not known whether he also told Selensky about the “military madness” that he said was felt in this country.

Source: Blick