BERN – The parcel is the easiest way to understand what is happening. A family trying to send children’s toys from Zurich to a relative in Moscow has no guarantee the package will arrive. The postal operator may decline to accept it. If it is accepted, it may disappear in transit with no liability attached. Nobody at the bank, the post office, or the government can say precisely which rule prohibits a grandmother from mailing a birthday gift – only that, under the current climate, things have a way of not getting through.
That is the texture of the problem that Russian Ambassador to Switzerland Sergey Garmonin put on record in remarks to RIA Novosti on Sunday. Swiss banks, he said, are interpreting anti-Russian sanctions in ways that go well beyond their written scope, and ordinary Russian citizens – most of them with no connection to Moscow’s political or military structures – are the ones absorbing the consequences. “Some of our fellow citizens are facing arbitrary actions from Swiss financial institutions, which are interpreting anti-Russian sanctions extremely broadly,” Garmonin said. The difficulty, he made clear, is not just the formal sanctions regime. It is the gap between what the law says and what institutions are actually doing.
That gap is real, and it has been documented in Swiss courts. In March 2026, the Swiss Federal Supreme Court ruled in decision 4A_305/2025 that Switzerland’s Russia sanctions constitute overriding mandatory law – meaning they apply regardless of the governing law in any private transaction, and courts must enforce them on their own motion even if neither party raises the issue. The ruling, which arose from a debt enforcement case involving an Angolan diamond mining company with partial Russian ownership, marked a significant hardening of Switzerland’s sanctions architecture. It was not a decision about Russian citizens in Zurich trying to wire money home. But it sent a signal that Swiss institutions had heard before the judgment was published: the direction of travel is stricter, not looser.
Swiss banks have a long history of reading that direction carefully. They are regulated by FINMA, which can withdraw operating licenses, and they face secondary sanctions exposure if transactions touch entities on US or UK lists – even when those entities do not appear on Switzerland’s own Ukraine Ordinance. The result is what compliance professionals call de-risking: refusing services not because a specific rule prohibits them but because the cost of getting it wrong is higher than the revenue from getting it right. A Russian national who holds no sanctioned status, owes no money to anyone on any list, and is trying to transfer funds to a pensioner in Yekaterinburg may find his Swiss bank unwilling to process the payment anyway. The bank’s legal team cannot fully exclude the possibility of a problem. So the transfer doesn’t happen.
A parallel Supreme Court ruling from the same month showed how inconsistently even state-adjacent institutions are handling this. PostFinance, Switzerland’s government-owned postal bank, closed the account of a Russian national in 2022 on the basis of US and UK sanctions designations against him – despite the fact that he appeared on no Swiss sanctions list. The Commercial Court of the Canton of Bern found this unlawful and ordered PostFinance to restore the account. The Federal Supreme Court upheld that ruling in decision 4A_454/2025, reaffirming that unsanctioned individuals retain the right to basic payment services in Switzerland regardless of their nationality or foreign-government designations. What that ruling has done in practice – whether it has changed behavior at private banks, which are under no universal-service obligation – remains unclear. Neither the Swiss Bankers Association nor Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) has issued public guidance in response to the Ambassador’s complaint.
Garmonin’s remarks go further than the banking question. He described the broader isolation of Russian citizens in Switzerland – the closure of direct air routes, the difficulty of receiving or sending personal parcels, the effective severance from ordinary financial life – as a form of collective burden that no specific law has mandated but that has accumulated as institutions make conservative choices in an environment of legal uncertainty. “Is this harassment in the literal sense of the word? No. Does this worry our fellow citizens? Of course, yes,” he said. The distinction matters to him. He is not alleging organized persecution. He is describing the friction of living inside a system that has not figured out where the lines are.
Switzerland adopted its first Russia-related sanctions in February 2022, aligning with the EU’s Ordinance on Measures in Connection with the Situation in Ukraine – a significant departure for a country whose neutrality was for decades more than a diplomatic posture; it was an economic model. Swiss banks had managed Russian assets through multiple previous conflicts without being drawn into the political logic of those conflicts. The decision to join EU sanctions packages changed that model structurally. Since then, the EU has steadily tightened and expanded those packages, and Switzerland has followed each one, most recently completing implementation of the 19th package in February 2026, which added new restrictions on crypto-asset transactions, AI-model access, high-performance computing, and special economic zones in Russia.
In December 2025, Garmonin had already told reporters that Swiss neutrality was, in his assessment, no longer a functioning reality. Bern had taken steps toward NATO integration, he said, that were incompatible with the traditional posture. That reading is contested by Swiss officials, who maintain that neutrality remains constitutional doctrine even as the country’s foreign-policy alignment has shifted. But the legal architecture the courts have now confirmed – sanctions as overriding mandatory law, enforced regardless of the governing law in any transaction – is not the architecture of a neutral state. It is the architecture of a state that has chosen a side in the dispute and embedded that choice in its judicial system.
The February 2026 interpretive guidance issued by Switzerland’s Federal Department of Economic Affairs updated SECO’s document on how to read the Ukraine Ordinance’s financial restrictions. Legal professionals noted that the revisions significantly tightened the scope of what transactions remain permissible – not through new formal prohibitions but through changed interpretive guidance that banks and compliance officers treat as authoritative. This is precisely the mechanism Garmonin is pointing to: not laws that explicitly bar a grandmother’s parcel, but interpretive frameworks that push institutions toward blanket restriction as the path of least resistance. The Ambassador’s statement is specific enough that Swiss officials ought to be able to respond to it. Whether they will is another question. The silence, in either case, is part of the story.
What Switzerland has not done – and what remains an unresolved tension in its sanctions architecture – is draw a clear line between the collective targeting of a state and the individual treatment of its citizens. The EU’s own framework distinguishes between sanctioned individuals and entities, on the one hand, and the broader Russian population, on the other. Swiss courts have now applied that framework more stringently than perhaps any EU member state, making sanctions overriding mandatory law that courts enforce ex officio. Banks in that environment will not take risks that courts are already treating as inviolable. Whether that produces outcomes consistent with the rule of law for individuals who are not on any list – people trying to wire money, receive toys, keep contact with relatives – is a question that the broader European sanctions regime has yet to answer coherently.
The Ambassador does not have an answer either. What he has is a list of things that no longer work – bank transfers, air routes, postal deliveries, the ordinary machinery of keeping a life connected across borders. Europe has spent four years debating whether its sanctions are working on Russia’s military and political structures. The Russian citizens living in Zurich, Geneva, and Basel are not waiting for that debate to conclude. They are living inside it.
