Switzerland must declare Putin a terrorist

Viktoria worked as a sommelier in a wine shop. She was expecting her first child. It would be born in December. Monday morning, shortly after 7 a.m., a Russian drone crashed into her old apartment in central Kiev. Viktoria was crushed by the rubble. Her husband Bogdan, a woman of retirement age and another neighbor died with her.

On the same day, Putin’s favorite newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda praised Russia’s “new miracle weapon,” the kamikaze drone Geran 2. “It flies along to the screeching of a moped and the wobbling of a tipsy courtesan. Swarms of these small but formidable planes descend on Ukrainian headquarters, ammunition depots and even tanks. They are blowing up power plants and oil depots.” Or just houses.

Kamikaze drones are an invention as primitive as it is insidious. With minimal financial costs, they achieve a maximum demoralizing effect. With death suddenly appearing out of nowhere, this weapon of war spreads its own form of fear and terror. Sergei Surovikin, the new commander of Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine, deliberately relies on this effect when he says, “We are methodically weariing the enemy.”

For Vladimir Putin, the war is a chronicle of failures. First he wanted to surprise Kiev, then the southeastern Ukraine. Most recently, the mobilization revealed the desolate state of the Russian government: the sick were called up, the elderly, minors – above all, there was and is no equipment for countless soldiers. Now the Moscow dictator has no choice but to terrorize the civilian population in Ukraine with drones.

At the same time, Russia seems to have no hope that this will change the fate of the war. In any case, Komsomolskaya Pravda writes: “Russia must hurry to deploy ‘geraniums’ before the West overruns Ukraine with its air defense system.” The drone terror of the past few days appears mainly as a show for the local public. With the mobilization, Putin has finally brought the war to Russia, now he must keep his subjects happy.

In other words, terror is carried out for the sake of terror. It makes everything even more pathetic than it already is.

Switzerland takes a questionable stance in the war in Ukraine. In fact, she pretends that this war doesn’t exist. Not only does our country not supply weapons, helmets and protective vests to Ukraine – the Federal Council has recently even refused to allow other states in possession of weapons produced here to pass this material on to Ukraine. To compensate for this lack of aid, the Confederacy presents itself to some extent as a kind of patron saint of civilian life. The federal government supports several infrastructure projects in Ukraine; Ignazio Cassis also hosted a conference on post-war reconstruction in Ukraine in June.

With his visit to Kiev this week, our Federal President wanted to show that Switzerland takes this special humanitarian role seriously. He was “shocked by the war of aggression against civilian infrastructure,” Cassis wrote on Twitter. It was to be expected that he would be violently attacked from the right and that his visit would be described as a violation of neutrality – but that does not make this criticism any less absurd.

However, given the brutality of the Russian actions, Cassis’ words are decidedly cautious. Since Bern has already taken a sharper position in a similar situation. When Serbia invaded Croatia in August 1991, the provincial government announced: “The Federal Council, addressing the Serbian authorities, states very clearly that Switzerland will never accept such a change of borders by brute force and that Serbia will move beyond our borders. civilized society.”

Cassis’ journey to Kiev was daring and important. As the patron saint of civilian life, Switzerland should express itself at least as clearly today as it was 31 years ago. For example, by declaring Putin a terrorist and his government an illegal terrorist organization.