The member of the Swiss parliament, member of the foreign affairs committee, Nicolas Walder, commenting on the issue of the selective disconnection of Russian banks from the SWIFT system (to date, only 7 banks have been disconnected), said that all Russian banks should be disconnected from the system, and sanctions should generally be strengthened.
The Swiss politician made the corresponding statement during an interview with Guildhall.
"Absolutely (the answer to the question about the need to disconnect the entire banking system of the Russian Federation - ed.). I believe that we should resort to tougher measures, tougher sanctions," said Nicolas Walder.
"The problem is that Switzerland can only support sanctions that are accepted by the UN, the OSCE or our closest partners, i.e. the EU. We can only join the EU sanctions without being able to impose them ourselves. If the bank is not on the EU list, we can’t impose sanctions on it, although we have tried to make amendments to our legislation, but have not yet made them. But yes, I believe that we should expand the measures we apply," the parliamentarian said.
"(...) I am in favor of expanding sanctions, I believe that we should impose sanctions on all banks, on all oligarchs, and I also support the ban on issuing visas to all Russians in principle, only if they are not opponents of the regime," Swiss politician concluded.
It should be noted that according to the research data of the Center for Defense Reforms, currently, only seven Russian banks out of the total number have been disconnected from the SWIFT system. The remaining banks continue to operate using SWIFT.
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