Neutral Swiss poised to freeze Russian assets – president
reuters.com
reuters.com
A question: does Switzerland have any prior precedent of actions like this? I thought they were neutral?
You can also ask Cuba what they think about the "new" aspect of financial cancellation, or 1920s Germany
If it was purely populist Germany would be using the $100b they have committed for NATO defence and spent it on universally popular policies e.g. tax cuts or handouts.
Well yeah, sanctions are also impacting us on many levels and they're damaging future relations for decades, that's obviously not something to take lightly. But what's the other options ? Not do anything ?
> There is a very Twitter mob feel about it
We would have said that about the Treaty of Versailles too, we just didn't have twitter back then. I think people are delusional because these types of events aren't a thing in Europe for quite some time now, I bet they'd blame the "cancel culture" and say that Putin is an angel
Twitter and media pressure that calls for war just a bit less than Russia invading Ukraine. I bet there are many people secretly very happy about that. Often it is just plain idiocy though.
Never in history has there ever been consequence-free speech or egalitarian trade and economics.
They aren't that neutral.
> Close cooperation has also been established in the area of international sanctions. As of 2006, Switzerland has adopted five EU sanctions that were instituted outside of the United Nations. Those affected the former Republic of Yugoslavia (1998), Myanmar (2000), Zimbabwe (2002), Uzbekistan (2006) and Belarus (2006). [0]
There were many more since.
> de-dollarization in China
I'm not sure how you mean this (which side), but I think a de-dollarization in China would be terrible. Countries will still rely on their manufacturing etc, so sanctioning them out of SWIFT would probably just weaken SWIFT, since it'd encourage them to have their own system (since it must exist by necessity of the world's dependence on Chinese stuff). These sort of sanctions only work because there's just a small fraction/party being excluded, I think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland%E2%80%93European_U...
Neutral as in "does not participate in armed conflicts between other states".
People just have a huge misconception of what the "neutrality" in "Swiss neutrality" really means.
Certainly in the field of international relations the concepts of good and evil are in the realm of media commentary and politicians. Foreign policy crafters, and the literature around them, have a completely other way of talking.
And while rooting for the Ukrainian side, I can't even find the Russian perspective within the sphere of information and data, other than what Russians tell me, which sounds so completely different information-wise, that I wonder if we live on the same planets. In fact I got off the phone with a Russian friend a few hours ago, and I asked their perspective but replied nothing in response. It was literally 100% inverted: that the country was fighting fascism and was conned by the U.S. due to weapons treaties in the past.
So the question is NOT about morals, whose are better - it's hard to find a villain in history with an army behind them, where each individual believed in their own evil.
So the question is about information asymmetry, at the very least, a foggy issue we have to get past before we talk about morals. Again, I'm about 90% confident that the Russian side aren't behaving in good faith, but I leave that 10%.
And most importantly I recognize my bias, in the superiority of Western European values, which means that I'm also biased with regards to those nations having the military upper hand. Which implies that even if the situation were much more ambiguous I would likely root for the Ukrainian side.
I hope that does the opposite of clear up the issue!
War is rarely a matter of good and evil purely. It's a muddled world we live in.
Oh, come on. You don't need to invoke existential certainty to know that unilateral military invasion of peaceful nations is "evil" inasmuch as that word has any meaning at all.
America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on flimsy pretexts and then continued to occupy the latter for what, 20 years?
Why wasn’t there similar international pushback against that?
Afghanistan was harboring al Qaeda and Iraq was threatening use of WMDs. They weren't peaceful nations.
The latter turned out to be bluster, supported by terrible intelligence and a U.S. administration that didn't have the wherewithal to counteract its own confirmation biases, and that deserves its own appropriate condemnation, but it's nowhere near the same thing.
1) America has Europe by the balls because we provide most of the major military security guarantees.
2) Iraq wasn’t exactly a peaceful nation (see: Kuwait)
3) Both Iraq and Afghanistan were governed by non democratic governments; a dictator in one and by religious zealots in the other
4) No one other than the local middle eastern Arabic countries were threatened by this action by the USA, and they didn’t have enough power to put pressure on the USA
In Ukraine, Russia invaded a neighbor of NATO countries, Ukraine was actually a peaceful nation and has a democratically elected government, and the countries that don’t like Russia actually have the power to try to stop it and can get by without anything from Russia.
Talk to a Russian, then come back and let's talk about what's an invasion of a peaceful nation. They're going to tell you that 14K were killed due to a fascist regime. Now, I don't believe that, but you're proving my point. Maybe it's just the naive perspective of moral certainty speaking, or maybe it's the lack of international perspective -- something one unfortunately commonly finds among Americans.
We come back to the question of evil. Maybe we grew up on too many cartoons and Hollywood movies, but good and evil are symbolic fictions.
What's less certain is the information, and my point is that you should always have a sliver of doubt in your mind that you're correct.
I certainly have the international perspective you accuse others of lacking, and I rather suspect it might in fact be you who lacks that perspective.
Nobody in positions of power believes for a second that Putin has anything but his own legacy in mind at this point.
Perhaps now is their time to fix that situation.
It makes all sense in the world, if you are not a cooperating entity you are cut off from the network and you are free to do your own thing.
Obviously, you can be bullied into things that might not be in your own interest but you are still free to asses the pro’s and con’s and break of if it’s better for you.
Unless you are benefiting too much from the arrangement, there’s no interest in bullying you because it’s actually a in a mutual interest to have you onboard.
It’s much, much better option to settling things down through killing each other.
No clue where the interpretation comes from that this "neutrality" is extended to basically everything around the topic of war or military. Switzerland is a weapon export country and has been for a long long time. Neutrality for this only means they dont export to countries at war or if there is reason to believable that the recipient would sell it to countries at war or if it would fall in the hands of terrorists etc. etc.
The real swiss neutrality is way broader and includes mandatory independence. So while Switzerland can join sanctions they decide and do not agree in advance to join sanctions the EU defined. It also includes military mission to promote peace. Swisscoy is the association of the Swiss Armed Forces in Kosovo. This is not against the swiss neutrality because there is no armed conflict there. The Swiss Armed Forces there are still armed for self-defense only.
I do like the ability to shape monetary policy, but that would only go hand in hand with governments not able to just deperson people.
Corporations do not offer any protection. Like on social media, if there is a legal question, the users gets banned.
How exactly does that work? As long as Americans send billions of dollars to them for their goods, I don’t see how they can escape it.
Usually, you'd expect a state like Ukraine (ex Sowjet) to be corrupt and run by oligarchs with no support by the populace. In that situation, Russia would waltz in, the old depot would flee the country, Russia would isntall a puppet and the populace would be indefferent to it, since it's just more of the same shit.
But Zelenskyy was serious in cleaning up the Ukraine, he is not fleeing and he is uniting the nation.
This was Putin's big mistake. He believed he could scare away a greedy despot to replace him with another one. Instead, the Ukraine has a true leader and developed a real national identity.
For Putin, this is a nightmare. For the west, we finally have someone worth supporting (often we have the issue that we don't know how is the bad and the good guy, see Syria, Mali).
I have nothing to prove it, this is just speculation, taken from some tweets I saw. It makes sense to me, but I have no social insights.
This whole thing could have looked very different under any of the former leaders of the Ukraine.
The west is singing his praises right now, but this isnt necessarily reflective of what Ukrainians think.
So much BS... He literally done 180 on his election promises, done a lot of unconstitutional moves, and his public support was continuously dropping to the point of losing to Poroshenko on hypothetical elections.
And to just because we have to make everything about US politics, the corrupt leader who was run out of town was elected with the assistance of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates who both ended up working on the Trump campaign less than two years after their cash cow was exiled to Russia.
He's not that clean himself, given that he was mentioned as holding offshore finances in the Pandora Papers leak.
Also he invested in the production company (Kvartal 95) that then created the show 'Servant of the People' where he was shot to stardom playing the role of a teacher elected president. The company then also paid to create a real party named 'Servant of the People' and managed to get him elected as president for real!!
https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-papers-r...
Where he got all that offshore money from is a question we can ponder. But it seems to me that he was primed for the position he is in.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article215489.html https://time.com/6144109/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-vikto... https://time.com/6076035/erik-prince-ukraine-private-army/ https://www.businessinsider.com/erik-prince-had-pitched-10-b...
Even though I am inclined to believe he is the lesser of two evils, it would seem that this war is in part being used as an advert for those munitions (see multiple videos released in the last 2 days from the drones). The Turkish OEM https://baykartech.com/en/uav/bayraktar-tb2/ was founded by Selçuk Bayraktar, an MIT graduate returnee who married Turkish president Erdogan's youngest daughter in 2016. Its apparent exclusive armament is the Turkish government's own Roketsan brand munition https://www.roketsan.com.tr/en/products/mam-c-smart-micro-mu... A UK entity accused Bayraktar of cloning their munitions rack design (the company denied the claim), and an Austrian motor manufacturer accused the company of redirecting their 100HP recreational aviation motors to military use.
I'd be interested to read more from a local about any public statements and private funding and control around those deals. While he's certainly the lesser of two evils in this conflict, history shows us the politicians are often not as clean as they like to make out, it's not out of the question that Zelenskyy or his cronies could have an undeclared private stake in the business and thus be personally profiting from the war and its aftermath.
No doubt that's possible. But if profiting off the war were his primary objective, then why would he stay in harm's way by remaining in Kyiv? Pretty risky bet, I'd say.
Totally ridiculous. Zelensky was selected as president for his acting skills, not management skills. He's as compromised as it gets.
No responsible leader of a civilized nation would goad/force his people into picking up AKs in the face of a vastly superior professional military force. He would accept the loss, surrender, and save as many lives as possible. But Zelensky is not a responsible leader, he is a mad sociopath trying to save his own skin, because he knows he has no place in the world should his regime fall.
Zelensky is actively gambling his people's lives away. Because they aren't his constituents. His constituents are on another continent.
Honestly curious: What has Ukraine’s president done in the past to show that he’s a good leader?
The world barely even knew of him a few months ago, until every Western platform started deep-throating us to herald him as the second coming of Jesus in the last 2 weeks or so.
The propaganda is at a bizarre level.
What I don't quite get is why even still pretend to not engage? Surely arming Ukraine with fighter jets is basically the same as flying missions yourself as far as Russia is concerned. If I where Putin at this point I would consider NATO to have started actively participating in the war.
Except Putin may nuke you. He's basically threatened that.
Why people assume that the Russian plan was to occupy whole Ukraine (the largest European country after Russia) in just several days? Even in Georgia with its much smaller army and territory it took them 5 days to be close to capturing its capital. As another example: it took US several weeks to conquer Iraq, which again is smaller than Ukraine and has a much denser distribution of population centers. Also unlike certain countries Russia does not want to bomb Ukraine into the stone age before moving ground troops in and instead it tries to keep whatever loyal parts of the populace it has there.
I literally haven't seen anyone assuming that. All theories seem to be about Russian army going in, getting rid of the government and replacing it with whatever arrangement works for Russia, then going back home.
I read or heard (maybe on http://iswresearch.org/) that Russia has very few smart bombs. If they had plenty, they might've used them as liberally as the US did in Iraq in 2004.
>Zelensky rejects US evacuation offer: I need ammunition, ‘not a ride’
gone the other way it probably would have worked.
Pretty ridiculous to think this when their isn't much of an opposition to regime change to. And when oligarchs and other interests are massively benefiting from the corruption.
It's purely to impose a serious cost on Russia so that they consider withdrawing from Ukraine and think twice about doing it again e.g. against Eastern European countries.
What rules out that Vladimir and Volodymyr aren’t in on this together to dupe other nations and later make up anyway?
It’s a classic con since time immemorial: 2 partners, one who pretends to be the baddie and another who pretends to be against him to gain the support of a dupe, and later split the profits.
Afghanistan after 9/11 is a good of example of something that was hard for another western nation to argue against the justification for starting (how it went is another story).
On a case-by-case basis. As you note, the international community probably wouldn't have reacted against the US regarding Afghanistan (and probably should have regarding Iraq).
Be aware that most people cannot read Chinese or Russian, and as such their whole world perspective is fed by an one sided narrative.
I suggest you listen to these[1][2] talks, and Putin's speech[3] on NATO expansion in Munich in 2007. Pozner[1] pointed out that up to 2007, Putin really tried to be friend with the West, including asking to join NATO.
Of course they were "the enemy".
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ
I made no reference to good aggression, only justifiable aggression. Even then, while it would be fine to form an argument that no such thing exists, it's unrealistic to despise the man who returns a punch.
As for Russia's reasonable concerns about the West and the nigh-impossibility of objectively or thoroughly observing foreign points of view - both are true and important, yet neither serve in the least to justify attacking Ukraine's capital.
If he was a normal president and with a functioning democracy, I doubt we would even be at the current situation. I saw the videos of Putin with his advisor (the Spy chief) and that was an exercise in “tell me what I want to hear.”
And I wouldn't be terribly surprised if most Russian voters will end up approving of the invasion provided Russian casualties and costs don't get too high.
US foreign policies have been a series of failures without any real consequence save for 9/11. No one is gonna sanction the US nor start a war with it.
Ukraine would never had joined NATO because it was an active war zone anyways. Putin didn't have to do anything to avoid Ukraine joining NATO.
Listening to his current explanations for the invasion doesn't make him sound like a good guy no matter the language or the perspective.
> Putin really tried to be friend with the West
And relations were relatively good until he decided to invade Ukraine, he just severed every diplomatic bridges and every single chances of progress for the next decades(s).
Putin's not the Devil but he clearly is the aggressor here. Ukraine was a sovereign state with a democratically elected government. You'd be hard pressed to use the "b-bu-but it's both sides" rhetoric here.
It does not prevent NATO from supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian army. The US reconnaissance planes have conducted regular patrols over Ukrainian territory. The British even tried to build naval bases in Berdyansk and Ochakovo. And with active and heated territorial disputes it's easy to see a hypothetical scenario of Ukraine trying to re-capture Donbas and Crimea by force after it felt it's sufficiently strong or Russia is weak enough, like Georgia tried with South Osetia.
>And relations were relatively good
I suggest watching the following videos if you want to learn about alternative points of view:
Did he? All I could come up with this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/04/ex-nato-head-s...
According to this person he didn't ask to join, he asked why he wasn't asked to join, and wanted to skip the process that countries-that-don't-matter have to go through.
And slightly more edgy: https://niccolo.substack.com/p/fuck-it-russias-final-break-w...
And this is why the offender is currently suffering under the heavy weight of sanctions having exterminated boatloads of people.
Oops. Sorry. Move along. Next.
Chomsky's take is not bad: https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1495330478722850817
Saudia Arabia attacking Houthis and Yemen seems like a clear illegal action. At least the ongoing attacks.
With the many financial laws and agreements that exist now between countries, Switzerland has less financial value (secrecy) than it once had. So it cannot afford to lose ground now.
I just wonder how this is supposed to work in any other way. They ensure that the war won't stop because Putin has already faced some consequences on the domestic front and how he has to show some black ink.
The sanctions can be lifted when Russia withdraws from Ukraine, pays reparations, and is bound by international agreements not to do something like this again.
My psychological analysis of him basically says Putin is the king of the gangsters and he knows as such he needs to keep everyone scared and also demonstrate his power. The way you get to be Putin is to behave in the most extreme way possible when crossed, this pattern is likely to continue one way or another.
We should seriously think about something we can do to give the gangster a way out (appease his ego while he in return withdraws). I know this sounds weak but the other options are really very bad, a disconnected Russia with loads of nukes with a leader with an increasingly extreme disposition that blames the West for all his problems (because Putin has stopped being able to be wrong). Tell me this situation I've outlined is fine because to me it certainly means sabotaging of the West at the least and nuclear war at worst?
That he will be replaced by people in the Kremlin is extremely unlikely in my opinion and who is to say his replacement will be anything less than consistent with the Cold War mentality Putin seems to be spouting.
It sounds like a semi-plausible option but a bad plan.
I suspect more people around Putin are afraid of the FSB than the KGB.
These wealthy people must have powerful connections that they can work with. It should be possible for them to organize some changes of office...
There's a really good video about this by CGP Grey that talks about dictatorships: https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs
And then think about some of the latest updates:
- nuclear threat
- increasing embassy protests
- seemingly total reliance on a new actor with a yet unknown trust wordiness ( i don't think anyone wants to be associated with Russia currently)
- travel restrictions for the rich + family ( superyacht, flights, ... )
- real estate seizure
- money seizure
- reduced currency value
- halved bank reserves ( because of seizure)
- potential family issues ( a lot of Russians have Ukraine ties/origin)
- family protests on the streets, civilian unrest ( anti-war), as I think most Russians don't want to be related as an aggressor
- neglect of his cronies worries
- booting off Swift/Switzerland and large expansion of targetted individuals
Something really seems off internally: eg. https://youtu.be/ucEs0nBuowE
Packed in six pieces of wood.
> and the people who surround him.
For once they can be heros.
This can be verified.
> pays reparations
This can be verified.
> is bound by international agreements not to do something like this again
This is not worth the paper it's written on, but perhaps it may be the only way and reach a peace soon and make everyone pretend to be friends while preparing for the next encounter.
Even if he were to win and gain control of Ukraine, he will lose. He likely will have lost support at home, and he absolutely will have lost support in much of the rest of the world.
If Putin leaves Ukraine, the asset freezing and all the other stuff stays, and may be discussed later.
That's why he won't leave Ukraine even under heavy discomfort of maintaining that presence.
The EU just announced that will provide financing for fighter jets that will be given to Ukraine. The EU president also said that will accept Ukraine in the EU (with due improvements of course). They are really big announcements. Everything has changed during these days.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
(I could easily imagine opening up North Stream 2 quickly, if the money paid for the gas would go to Ukraine until the damages are compensated for)