Hello to everyone and welcome to the next edition of Lviv International Talks. And I welcome our distinguished guest today in the studio, the ambassador of Switzerland to Ukraine and Moldova, Felix Baumann.

Good morning.

Good morning and welcome to Lviv. I suppose it's your first official visit here.

Thank you so much. Thank you for the warm welcome. Yes, it's my first official visit to Lviv.

We'll talk more about the projects of Switzerland in Lviv and in the Lviv region a bit later. But I would like to start our conversation with something more vital and more important for all of us, the war related issues.This summer a big summit about the future peace for Ukraine is going to happen in Switzerland, with probably 100 countries to participate. Can you tell us a few words about it?

Yes, that's right. The summit will be held in Switzerland in June, and it will be actually hosted by the president of the Swiss Confederation, Viola Amherd. And the aim of the summit will be to have a dialogue between as many countries as possible on ways how to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace for Ukraine, but at the same time also to create a common understanding of what should be a future framework, favorable precisely to this objective, and how a concrete roadmap for a future peace plan could look like. And of course, it is about respecting international law and the cardinal values of the charter of the United Nations.

Do you believe it will really work? Because we do have many international laws that are being absolutely neglected by Russia. Why do you think this framework should work in the future and how?

Well, for the time being, of course, there are still many, many open issues, but that's also why it is precisely so important to gather a large group of countries to start these discussions right now.

I just came back from the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, where hundreds of journalists, editors and media managers from all major publications came together. And I heard there from many colleagues from all over the world the questions like, “Are you ready for a ceasefire?”, “When do you think it's going to happen?”, “Do you think you can give part of your land to have peace?”. It means, from my perspective, there`s some kind of fatigue from the war in Ukraine. Do you have similar feelings, observations when you talk to your colleagues, diplomats in the West? Or maybe it's different?

Well, what we see is that we live in an incredibly complex world. We have the war in Ukraine for now, going on at least in its full scale dimension for more than two years. We have a war in the Middle East. In Europe, many countries face high numbers of migrants coming into Europe. We have climate change. We still have an economic situation that in many areas is not easy. And so I think this whole complexity is quite challenging.

But when it comes to Ukraine, and now speaking just for my own country, for Switzerland, I still see a very high solidarity in the population. We can see that we still have about 60,000 Ukrainians who are in Switzerland. It's also what we see in the media - the media is still covering widely the situation and the war in Ukraine. And at a government level, our support for Ukraine remains high.

But then also the health secto that you mentioned. That's an important area we've been working in for many years, actually, that started much before the start of the full scale military aggression. And for example, one is war trauma rehabilitation project that was redirected in the last years with swiss financing. It's about providing rapid access to high quality service and rehabilitation services for the wounded and wounded civilians and veterans that were affected by the ongoing conflict. But another key area of intervention is mental health.

And here also it's about mitigating the effects of the war on those people afflicted by mental health, diseases, in order to find high quality and rapid access to services. And then yesterday it was also my aim to visit one business where the biggest investor is Swiss. We had a talk about the business perspectives for the region, and especially the prospects for small and medium enterprises. That's also a domain we are involved in. And then finally, I had a talk in the late afternoon with BUR (Build Ukraine Together), with civil society. And I must say, I was really impressed by these young people, because it's about them helping, volunteering to do reconstruction in war torn communities.

It goes much, much beyond this. It's also about developing trust, I think, in cohesion in society, and also to create a community of responsible and capable youth. And I must say, I was really very inspired by this conversation.

So do you see this special force, special power of Ukraine in combination of businesses and civil society, especially at the local level?

We're one of the few countries to have humanitarian assistance of our own. That means we directly implement our own projects with our own teams, which allows us to be fast and deliver the kind of assistance that communities really need close to the front line.

Basically every week I have colleagues from the embassy who travel to these areas. Even this week, we have, again, two missions to these areas. In the western part, you have investments by private business, and then you have a whole range of cooperation projects from digitalization and the ones we mentioned before, health also very important. We still support governance and decentralization in Ukraine. And, yes, again, I think we work with a wide variety of partners and civil society.

Yes, indeed. Switzerland has a long tradition of public transport. We're probably one of the countries most fond of our railways. I think the Swiss almost love their railways and it's probably one of the populations in Europe who travels most kilometers per year in public transport.

But beyond this, yes it's true we have a lot of expertise from planning to suppliers in all kind of fields- from the technical level, at the infrastructure level, signalization level, hardware, software. For example, we have a project in which we supported the Ukrainian railways with rail fasteners which allow to renovate tracks. We had such a project for almost 400 tracks last year and there will be a second phase this year. There`s something we do, for example, in Vinnytsia, there was such support of the city, of urban city planners.

For me it's always a huge pleasure to discover different traditions, including culinary traditions from one city to another.

The interview was conducted by Taras Yatsenko

Photos by Ivan Stanislavskyi / Tvoe Misto

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Lviv Now is an English-language website for Lviv, Ukraine’s «tech-friendly cultural hub». It is produced by Tvoe Misto («Your City») media hub, which also hosts regular problem-solving public forums to benefit the city and its people.