Switzerland may provide troops for a future peacekeeping mission in Ukraine if a request is received and the government agrees.
This was stated by the Commander-in-Chief of the Swiss Armed Forces Thomas Süssli, Reuters reports.
"We could probably send about 200 soldiers over a period of 9-12 months," Süssli said, stressing that this would be a matter for the government and parliament.
Talks about deploying peacekeepers are currently purely hypothetical, as it remains unclear how the situation between Russia and Ukraine will develop, Süssli added.
"There is no peace yet, and there has been no request from the UN," he noted.
Neutral Switzerland participates in several peacekeeping missions around the world, the largest of which is in Kosovo, where its soldiers support NATO forces.
Europeʼs participation in the settlement of the war in Ukraine
After the US President Donald Trump reported that during a phone call with Putin they agreed to immediately begin peace talks, the foreign ministers of Ukraine, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Poland, Germany, and the European Union stressed in a statement that Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations to end the Russian-Ukrainian war.
During the Munich Security Conference, Trumpʼs special envoy Keith Kellogg said that Europe would not be physically at the negotiating table between Russia and Ukraine, but its interests would be taken into account. He added that one of the reasons why previous peace talks failed was that they involved too many countries.
The Axios publication, which revealed the details of the conversation between Zelensky and Trump, noted that the US president supported the idea of deploying European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine — this could become one of the security guarantees.
After that, the AP wrote that a group of European countries were privately working on a plan to send troops to Ukraine to help with post-war security.
The FT noted that the US has asked European countries to provide detailed proposals for the weapons, peacekeeping troops and security measures they could provide to Ukraine as part of any security guarantees.
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