Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has heightened great power rivalry and made Switzerland – home to many international organizations – a hub for Russian and Chinese espionage, according to the Intelligence Service Swiss.
“Russia has destroyed the rules-based peace order in Europe,” notes the Federal Intelligence Service (SRC) soberly in its annual report published on Monday. The SRC is also in charge of counterintelligence.
A blasting that means that “international forums for the promotion of peace and collective security such as the UN and the OSCE have again lost their effectiveness and a new stable world order is not on the horizon”, analyze Swiss spy services.
Added to this is the trend “towards a bipolar world order, marked by the systemic rivalry between the United States and China”.
And so “foreign, mainly Russian and Chinese, espionage activities still pose a high threat to Switzerland,” according to the report.
Due, among other things, to its role as a host state hosting many international organizations, “Switzerland is among the European countries in which the largest number of members of the Russian intelligence services are deployed under diplomatic cover” .
A third party spy
“Of the approximately 220 people accredited as diplomatic or techno-administrative staff in the Russian missions in Geneva and Bern, probably at least a third still work for the Russian intelligence services”, specified Christian Dussey, the head of the intelligence services. , at a press conference.
The Swiss secret services have only 450 employees.
Geneva is home to the European headquarters of the UN as well as the headquarters of many UN agencies.
This is also where hundreds of diplomats regularly meet to take part in the various annual meetings of these bodies, be it the Human Rights Council, which is currently taking place, the World Health Assembly or the International Labor Conference.
So many opportunities for a spy to blend in with the crowd, make contacts and gather intelligence in a city where many financiers, economic and political leaders also meet.
Switzerland’s mandate on the UN Security Council – since January 2023 and for the first time in its history – “increases the threat posed by espionage to the Swiss” who work on Security Council files, according to The report.
They inevitably become targets for spies.
The war in Ukraine is also forcing the SRC to focus on regions it hadn’t had its eye on until then, to prevent Russia from circumventing laws prohibiting the export of weaponry by relying on companies based in the Eurasian Economic Union but also in Turkey or India, notes the SRC.
Prigozhin
Mr Dussey remained cautious about the lessons to be learned from this weekend’s rebellion by Wagner mercenaries on the orders of their leader Yevgeny Prigojine: it is “a great internal challenge” for Russia, he said , believing that “we are now in a phase of de-escalation. »
The instability of a nuclear power inevitably worries, which explains the “calibrated” Western reactions, he added. There was no question of intervening or taking advantage of the situation, according to the boss of the Swiss services.
It is too early to pass judgment on the impact of this event, he believes, recalling the events that occurred in 1991 (attempted putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev) and 1993 (Boris Yeltsin’s march on the Russian Parliament), which in both cases led, in his view, to a marked strengthening of the state apparatus.