During the meeting of Ambassador Iryna Venediktova with the director of the Foundation Suisse de deminage Hansjorg Eberle and the director of the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining (GICHD) Stefano Toscano, urgent humanitarian demining issues were discussed.

Humanitarian demining is an important area in which Switzerland supports us.

The FSD humanitarian demining program began in 2015 in the Donetsk region. The foundation's teams have been working in the Chernihiv and Kharkiv oblasts since the summer of 2022 and have already discovered and defused hundreds of explosive devices there.

FSD trains specialists in Ukraine. So far, 200 Ukrainian specialists have been trained, a quarter of them are women. In 2023, the foundation plans to increase its staff by at least 100 people. The federal government's "spring package" for Ukraine provides around CHF 1.5 million to support FSD's activities in Ukraine.

The Ambassador visited the Geneva Humanitarian Demining Center, which plans to advise Ukraine on implementing a national demining strategy and improving standards in this area. Together with the relevant Ukrainian authorities, it has already ensured the functioning of the mine action management information system and issued a special manual on ammunition used in Ukraine.