Switzerland will adopt all the sanctions that the European Union has imposed on Russian people and companies and freeze their assets to punish the invasion of Ukraine, the government said in a sharp deviation from the country’s traditional neutrality.

“We are in an extraordinary situation where extraordinary measures could be decided,” President and Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told a news conference in Bern on Monday, flanked by the finance, defence and justice ministers.

Only history would tell if such a move could happen again, he said. Swiss neutrality remained intact but “of course we stand on the side of Western values,” he added…

Switzerland also adopted financial sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, effective immediately, and closed its airspace to most Russian aircraft…

It added that [Switzerland] had also banned five oligarchs close to Putin from entering the country, without naming them.

I repeat: really really unusual.

See this for some background about Switzerland and the Nazis during WWII.

Isn’t the Russian pipeline still flowing in Europe, though?

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However, the EU will get you one way or another. The Swiss are part of what’s known as the Schengen Area, in which people can travel without the old-fashioned restrictions of visas. Here’s the way it’s described:

Schengen Area, signifies a zone where 26 European countries, abolished their internal borders, for the free and unrestricted movement of people, in harmony with common rules for controlling external borders and fighting criminality by strengthening the common judicial system and police cooperation.

Schengen Area covers most of the EU countries, except the UK, Ireland and the countries that are soon to be part of: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus. Although not members of the EU, countries like: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein are also part of the Schengen zone.

It may have seemed like an innocuous thing to do way back when the idea was first being proposed. But it’s one of those foot-in-the-door phenomena that has meant that Schengen Area countries have had difficulty controlling entry by “migrants,” and now we see that gun control is part of the bargain as well, even for non-EU-member countries. The threat by the EU is to throw the non-complying country out of the Schengen Area, and thus hamper its tourism and perhaps a lot more.

Back in May (although I missed the news at the time) the Swiss voters opted for Schengen convenience over the right to bear arms, in one of those referendums we’ve heard so much about. In this case, the results of the referendum have stood, because the Swiss voted just the way the EU and their government wanted them to:

Almost 64% of voters in Sunday’s referendum supported tougher restrictions on semi-automatic and automatic weapons, final results show.

Switzerland is not an EU member, but risked removal from the open-border Schengen Area if it had voted “no”.

Nearly 48% of Swiss households own a gun – among the highest rates of private ownership in Europe.

The EU had urged the country to tighten its laws in line with rules adopted by the bloc following the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

The rules restrict semi-automatic and automatic rifles and make it easier to track weapons in national databases.

The EU’s initial proposal sparked criticism in Switzerland, because it meant a ban on the tradition of ex-soldiers keeping their assault rifles.

Swiss officials negotiated concessions, but some gun activists argued that the rules still encroached on citizens’ rights.

So, reading between those lines, my guess is that the proposal was sold on the strength of two things—to prevent terrorism (which seems highly unlikely to me; au contraire) and that it would be only a small change that wouldn’t affect too many people.

Till the next time. And the next.

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