Switzerland: Ordinance on Measures against Belarus (SR 946.231.116.9) — total revision, trade and financial sanctions

Mechanism

The ordinance is Switzerland's autonomous mirroring of the EU's Belarus sanctions regime (cf. Regulation (EU) 2022/355), adopted the same month:

• Import bans: petroleum/petroleum products, potassium chloride

("potash"), wood, iron and steel, cement and rubber products originating in or exported from Belarus.

• Export bans: goods for manufacturing/processing tobacco products,

weapons and repression goods, surveillance equipment/technology/software, and goods for Belarus's military, technological or security development.

• Financial sanctions: no public financing or financial assistance for

trade with or investment in Belarus; restrictions on dealing in securities, loans and deposits; a ban on transactions with the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus; exclusion of listed Belarusian banks from SWIFT.

Downstream implications

• Switzerland's commodity-trading hub (Geneva/Zug) loses a legal channel for

Belarusian potash and wood trade finance, compounding the EU's parallel ban announced two weeks earlier.

Open questions

• No trade-value or volume figure is disclosed in the ordinance itself;

scale is qualitative (product-category ban, not a quota or tariff).