Switzerland will allow the sale of weapons to countries embroiled in conflict, in a move favourable to its defence industry. The country insists such exports are compatible with neutrality.
When you finally realise that neutrality and ethics aren’t identical.
Nah… they realized, that nobody is buying their military stuff because of restrictions.
They never were neutral. Austria never was neutral. This is just a diplomatic term but ultimately doesn’t mean what it implies.
Switzerland is always happy to launder and store money for any despot or pariah state. That is not neutral.
Austria’s companies made (and still make) good money with Russian oligarchs. Anything but neutral.
It’s a made up concept to have some sort of argument for the newspapers and common ground between diplomatic talks.
That has nothing to do with ethics. It’s simply economical, and the economics of arms sales to European countries have fundamentally changed with the revival of Russian imperialism and the Ukraine conflict.
Apart from countries with imperial ambitions, countries typically arm themselves for defensive purposes in order to ideally deter possible attackers from attacking in the first place. Pretty much any country with a potentially aggressive neighbour was facing the same problem laid bare by the Swiss refusal to sell weapons to countries supporting Ukraine after the Russian invasion: The moment you are involved in a conflict, even if you’re just defending yourself, Switzerland won’t sell you any of the stuff they were happily selling to you before.
So why even buy weapons whose supplier will refuse to sell you any more in case you actually have to use them? Isn’t it better to buy them someplace else, where you have a good chance of the supply not drying up the moment someone invades you? I guess the Swiss arms manufacturers (of which there are plenty) did notice a sudden reluctance of their regular customers to buy, and went to the government to complain.
Especially with all of Europe rearming in the face of being abandoned by their former ally across the Atlantic, that’s just a business opportunity too big to ignore.
Ethics and economics aren’t magically unrelated.
A late realization.
Parliament has decided to automatically grant arms exports and re-exports for 25 countries
Does this include Ukraine? Cannot find a country list.
Source: Swissmem, Industry, in German
Apparently not.Swiss Parliament (German source)
“Another point of criticism raised by opponents is that even with the reform, it would still be prohibited to supply weapons to Ukraine. If, for example, Germany wanted to purchase war material from Switzerland in the future and it was already clear that this material would subsequently be delivered to Ukraine or another country at war at that time, the Federal Council would have to intervene.”
Only source I found quickly, and from 2025-12-04, so I’m not sure how up to date it really is.
If it is still true, it means this whole manoeuvre wouldn’t fix the problem other countries have with the current Swiss regulations.
These other countries got wary because they couldn’t give their weapons to a country in need due to Swiss regulations - and this would remain the case. So it’s eyewash.
SRF Explainer in German (Video)
Swissmem (Verband der Schweizer Maschinen-, Elektro- und Metallindustrie, German)
Basically export to everyone except Ukraine. The Re-export regulation will be removed, with the federal council retaining a Veto … which they probably will only use when its about Ukraine.
An argument from the counter campaign is, that if they had wanted to help Ukraine, like they claimed at the beginning of the revision, they could have just changed small details.
Especially lifting restrictions for the US, Hungary and Argentina but not Ukraine is insane to me.
It looks like a list of countries that are so comfortably safe, secure and stable (well… maybe not the US) that they won’t have a need for weapons anytime soon anyway. Excluding the Baltics for example only strengthens this suspicion.
