New Delhi, June 14 -- BERN - The parcel is the easiest way to understand what is happening. A family trying to send children's toys from Zurich to a relative in Moscow has no guarantee the package will arrive. The postal operator may decline to accept it. If it is accepted, it may disappear in transit with no liability attached. Nobody at the bank, the post office, or the government can say precisely which rule prohibits a grandmother from mailing a birthday gift - only that, under the current climate, things have a way of not getting through.

That is the texture of the problem that Russian Ambassador to Switzerland Sergey Garmonin put on record in remarks to RIA Novosti on Sunday. Swiss banks, he said, are interpreting anti-Russian sanc...