As we have recently celebrated the eightieth anniversary of VE and VJ Day, I have naturally been reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of documentaries about the end of World War II in both Germany and Japan. The mechanics and political technicalities of the German surrender are particularly fascinating to me, as the event represented not only the cessation of fighting but also the succession of states – with the Third Reich dissolving in favour of the Allied occupation zones. It is a reminder that, even in times of total war and with the prospect of total annihilation, there are still laws and protocols which must be followed, most notably the famous Geneva Conventions.

Key to the successful operation of these laws is the presence of at least a small number of neutral countries which maintain diplomatic relations – however strained – with both factions. This can lead to some interesting shenanigans: When my late grandmother got me A. J. P. Taylor’s¹ The First World War for Christmas 2013 I was amused to read that before the United States took a side there were British and German ambassadors in Washington D.C. competing for Woodrow Wilson’s favour in loans and arms contracts. The novel Winston’s War by Michael Dobbs (which I read in the summer of 2018) has a subplot in which Churchill discovers that Britain is short of rifles and hatches a cunning plan to buy second-hand German ones instead, because the Reich had such a surplus that they were still exporting them commercially to neutral countries on the continent. Though they weren’t explicitly mentioned very often, neutral states and organisations also played an important role in The Barbed-Wire University by Midge Gillies (which I finished last April), since the parcels, letters and so forth that the Allied prisoners received from home were hardly the sort of things which their Axis captors would (or indeed could) have delivered themselves. Neutral countries are also necessary for most forms of reliable news reporting (whether or not related to the war) to get from one side to the other – though how this works in the internet age is probably worth another article.

The specific aspect of wartime diplomacy which interests me for the purposes of this article, and which I only discovered in my recent Wiki-reading, is the concept of “Protecting Powers”. Put simply, this means that when two countries have broken off diplomatic relations (and especially if they have declared war) then their ambassadors and/or other official representatives on each other’s soil will be withdrawn. A neutral third country will then be appointed to act as a go-between while the warring countries cannot communicate directly. This third country will have an “interests section” as a department of its own embassy, and will be the official channel for humanitarian aid, personnel exchanges and, eventually, peace negotiations. In some cases the PP’s embassy will take over the former embassy buildings² of the country that it protects, and may even re-employ the same lower-level staff, so that the “interests section” is a polite fiction to allow the former embassy to continue in all but name.

There are limits to what a PP can realistically do, as both parties in the conflict must agree to their appointment – a PP which allows its interests section to push too far may see its neutrality questioned by the host country, and then its own diplomatic ties threatened. Switzerland, unsurprisingly, is a popular choice for this role, as is Sweden. The Wikipedia page on Protecting Powers has a catalogue of historic and current examples, noting that by the end of World War II Sweden held 114 mandates involving 28 countries. At the time of writing, the Swedish embassy in North Korea hosts interests sections for ten other states. There was a period in the last decade when Britain broke off relations with Iran, so the Swedish embassy in Tehran hosted a British interests section, while Oman’s in London hosted the Iranian.

Of the serious armed conflicts taking place in the world right now, the most important – at least from a European perspective – is that between Russia and Ukraine. Although relations had already become icy with Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, it was his launch of a full-scale invasion in February 2022 that saw them broken off entirely. This war has now been going on for 42 months, i.e. more than half as long as Britain was fighting in World War II. Having gotten into this topic, I was naturally curious as to whom the two countries had chosen as their PPs. None of the Wikipedia articles which should have mentioned it actually did so, however, so I asked the question in various talk pages. At time of uploading, only one other contributor has managed to find any information relating to this query: Based on some articles found on a Russian news site, it looks as if there still aren’t any! In a conference in Canada in 2024 (already way too late, really) there were offers by the Vatican, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Lithuania and Qatar to perform the role, but nothing was agreed, though Qatar at least has been involved in some POW exchanges. Putin has said Switzerland lost its neutral status by joining in sanctions on the Russian economy, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (which can also act as PP if no sovereign state is available) has struggled to get access. I might have thought that Turkey would be a candidate, since they had hosted some (unsuccessful, of course) peace talks, but they are not mentioned at all.

This perhaps goes to show that comparisons with the 1940s may be, if anything, a bit understated: To put it bluntly, the current Russian government is at least in some respects failing to comply with protocols which even he of the small moustache managed to honour!

Article from SwissInfo: Russia rejects protecting power mandate agreed by Switzerland and Ukraine (11 August 2022)

Articles from RosBiznesConsulting:

• The Red Cross responded to Ukraine’s invitation to visit the Kursk region (17 September 2024)
• Russia and Ukraine exchanged letters from prisoners of war via Qatar (25 October 2024)
• Kyiv announced the country is the patron of Ukrainians in Russia (2 November 2024)

Article from Media Center Ukraine: Bohdan Chumak: The involvement of a protecting power could become an effective tool in securing the return of prisoners of war (8 January 2025)

Article from Al Jazeera: Russia and Ukraine discuss more prisoner exchanges at Istanbul talks (23 July 2025)