Vienna — Switzerland assumed the chairmanship of the OSCE on 1 January and presented its programme to the Permanent Council on 15 January, becoming the first country to lead the organisation three times — after 1996 and 2014 — and doing so with a motto that reads like a diagnosis: when diplomacy seems impossible, it becomes crucial.
Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis outlined five priorities, topped by restoring the OSCE’s ability to act: budgets agreed on time, decisions unblocked, mandates fulfilled. The list also includes support for a just peace in Ukraine, the release of the three OSCE staff members still detained in occupied territory, strengthening the organisation’s human dimension, and preparing its institutions for what Cassis called the security order that will follow the war.
The Swiss programme is structured around four conferences through the year, culminating in the Ministerial Council in Lugano on 3 and 4 December — a return to the canton where Switzerland’s diplomatic tradition runs deepest, and a symbolic pairing with the federal government’s own peace-conference diplomacy on Ukraine.
Cassis inherits the ceasefire contingency planning Finland launched, and was careful to frame it as readiness rather than expectation. Switzerland’s credentials in the file are distinctive: a neutral state, guardian of the Geneva Conventions, that has hosted two Ukraine peace summits and maintains channels to Moscow that few Western capitals still hold.
The detainees file sits closest to the institution’s heart. Dmytro Shabanov, Maksym Petrov and Vadym Golda have now been imprisoned for more than 1,300 days on espionage convictions the organisation calls fabricated. Cassis told the Council their release is a personal priority — as his three predecessors said before him, a repetition that measures how little leverage Vienna actually holds.
Switzerland’s third chairmanship arrives at a hinge moment: an American administration pushing for an end to the war, a European alliance rearming, and an organisation whose founding principles await either vindication or burial in whatever settlement comes. Bern’s wager, Cassis said, is that the OSCE will be needed most at exactly the moment everyone assumes it is obsolete.
Media-Society.com is a press network association based in Spain, founded in 2020. More at www.media-society.com.
