No, no, and again no. Switzerland continues to deny other European countries the right to supply Ukraine with arms and ammunition produced on Swiss soil. Alain Berset, the Swiss president, thus notified Tuesday, April 18, an end of inadmissibility to the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who once again asked him for permission to deliver to Kiev about 12,000 ammunition stored in Germany for the 37 German Gepard anti-aircraft tanks sent to the front a year ago.
Bern has responded in the same way in recent months to requests from Spain and Denmark for anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles "made in Switzerland".
Sacrosanct neutrality
"We cannot be forced to violate our own laws," Berset said during his visit to Germany. The confederation is indeed hiding behind its famous neutrality to justify its inflexibility since the beginning of the great Russian offensive in Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Legally, it does not have the right to sell arms to a country that is actively engaged in a military conflict. That's not all: Bern also refuses to allow countries with stocks of Swiss-made weapons to ship them back to a nation at war.
The imbroglio around the German Gepard illustrates the very concrete consequences of this position. This armored vehicle had indeed been one of the very first Western tanks delivered to Ukraine and the war gave it a new raison d'être: that of "drone killer".
Germany has not used Gepard since the early 2010s. "It was manufactured in the 1970s to shoot down Soviet helicopters in the event of USSR air raids on Western Europe," said Jeff Hawn, a Russian military expert and external consultant for the New Lines Institute, a U.S. geopolitical research center. But the development of more modern weapons and the collapse of the Soviet regime eventually convinced Berlin that this anti-aircraft tank was obsolete.
Nevertheless, this "defense system remains very efficient. It brings together in a vehicle everything necessary to counter enemy planes, missiles, helicopters and drones up to a distance of 3,500 meters," said Alexandre Vautravers, editor-in-chief of the Swiss Military Review and former deputy commander of an armored brigade.
In addition to great mobility, it is "especially its very sophisticated radar system that is its strength," says Jeff Hawn. These assets allowed the Gepard to become the star of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region in September 2022. "The Russians who had great difficulty knowing where the Ukrainian forces were sought to locate them with drones, and the Gepard was used to destroy them and thus allow the Ukrainians to maintain their tactical advantage," said Gustav Gressel, a specialist on Russian military issues at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
It was on this occasion that this armored vehicle earned its reputation as a "drone killer". "Its radars and the ability to lock a target make it more effective than other man-portable air defense systems that don't have as good a detection system, and it wouldn't be very cost-effective to use guided missiles that can cost tens of thousands of dollars to shoot down simple drones," Hawn said.
Ammunition sinkhole
Gepard is also expected to play an increasingly important role because "Russia is increasingly using drones to support its operations," adds the American expert.
And this is where the Swiss pack hurts. As Germany has turned the page on the Gepard, it has also stopped manufacturing adequate ammunition. Switzerland, the long-standing technological partner of this air defence system, became its main supplier.
Since the delivery of the first tanks to Ukraine in July 2022, Berlin has not stopped soliciting Bern. "The ammunition issue was problematic from the start," the Tagesschau, the main news programme of Germany's leading television channel, said in November.
Germany had supplied 60,000 shells for Gepard "from stocks probably dating back to before the 1990s, at a time when the Swiss were less attentive to the possibility of re-exporting the weapons they manufactured," notes Gustav Gressel.
It's not much: "Gepards have a very high consumption of ammunition," says Jeff Hawn. In theory, they can fire up to 1,000 shells per minute, but "in general, they use a hundred rounds of ammunition per salvo," says Gustav Gressel.
Hence fears that Ukraine will quickly run out of ammunition for its "drone killers". Several Anglo-Saxon and German media have already announced that, without a quick decision by Switzerland, the Gepards will no longer be useful shortly. Even Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, urged Switzerland in March to give the green light to the reshipment of ammunition for Gepard held in German stockpiles.
Switzerland as a scapegoat?
Alarm bells that would have been sounded a little quickly for the taste of the Swiss military expert Alexandre Vautravers. "I have not heard any Ukrainian confirmation of a specific lack of ammunition for Gepards – which are also produced in other countries [Norway, Turkey, Spain, editor's note]," he said. An opinion partly shared by Gustav Gressel. "There was an obvious lack of ammunition after the counter-offensive against Kharkiv, but it seems that the Ukrainians have managed to obtain it since then," said the expert on the conflict in Ukraine.
It is difficult to know where these providential munitions would come from. "Germany has asked other countries that have stocks, such as Brazil and Qatar," Gressel said. Brazil has made it clear that it will not supply arms to Ukraine, but Qatar has not taken an official position on this issue.
For Alexandre Vautravers, all this controversy around the Swiss refusal to let Germany send its ammunition stocks "is mainly an attempt by Berlin – criticized for its slowness and not having sufficiently supplied heavy weapons to Ukraine – to defuse these criticisms by pointing an accusing finger at other countries, while trying to tip Switzerland into the camp of countries that deliver weapons to Kiev".
Nevertheless, with a Ukrainian counter-offensive on the horizon, "these Gepards could be brought to play a very active role to protect the advance of the troops," says Jeff Hawn. Under these conditions, there is no question of taking the risk of running out of ammunition for these "drone killers". If Bern agreed to put a little water in the wine of its sacrosanct neutrality, it would better respond to the "urgency of the situation," said Le Monde in an editorial published in November 2022.
Germany also intends to reduce this dependence on "made in Switzerland" as soon as possible. Rheinmetal, the German manufacturer of Gepard, bought Spanish ammunition manufacturer Expal Systems in November for more than a billion euros. "The first ammunition for Gepards in Ukraine should come out of the factory this summer," says Gustav Gressel. It remains to be seen whether this delay is compatible with Ukrainian counter-offensive plans.
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