After meeting a Ukrainian delegation, Cassis also travels to Russia.Image: keystone
On Thursday and Friday, Federal Councilor Ignazio Cassis will travel to Moscow as OSCE Chairman to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
02/05/2026, 06:59Feb 5, 2026, 5:09 p.m
Federal Councilor Ignazio Cassis landed in Moscow on Thursday as OSCE Chairman for a two-day visit. The aim of the trip was dialogue with “all sides,” he wrote on X. A meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is planned for Friday.
With the trip, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is reaffirming its willingness to “support efforts to achieve a just and lasting peace in accordance with international law and the Helsinki principles,” Foreign Minister Cassis wrote on Platform X on Thursday. He began the trip with OSCE Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu.
The meeting with Lavrov is scheduled for Friday, a spokeswoman for Cassis’ department said at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency. Talks are planned about efforts to end the war in Ukraine, as the OSCE announced in advance. The possible role of the OSCE in promoting a just and lasting peace should be discussed.
The war in Ukraine is not mentioned as a topic in a statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry about the upcoming meeting. The talks will focus on overcoming the deep crisis in which the OSCE currently finds itself. According to a Russian communiqué on Thursday, the crisis resulted from “destructive actions by certain Western countries.”
On Monday, Cassis traveled to Kiev with Sinirlioglu. There they met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiha.
For the first time in Moscow since the Russian attack
The Swiss Foreign Minister has not been in Moscow since the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Since then, only a few European heads of government and ministers have traveled to the Russian capital.
Cassis was last in Moscow in June 2019. At that time he opened the new Swiss embassy and met with Foreign Minister Lavrov. At that time, the two foreign ministers discussed, among other things, the situation in Ukraine. (sda)