It is even worse in Portuguese; there is only a two letter difference: Suécia (Sweden) vs Suíça (Switzerland) — or three letters depending on your perspective, but in Portuguese the c with cedilla is not considered to be a different letter from a plain c, and in this case both forms are pronounced the same. Therefore some level of confusion is understandable, even expected.
In English they are similar as well but spelling and pronunciation are different enough that there should be less confusion, at least on paper. Not sure why there is such confusion in practice.
Just yesterday or so I watched an "Alternative Contries"[1] video on YouTube where the most hilarious proposal -- took me a while to grok -- was Australia-Hungary.
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[1]: Kind of a sub-genre of alternate history and/or history-simulation-game AI timelapse videos.
In English they are similar as well but spelling and pronunciation are different enough that there should be less confusion, at least on paper. Not sure why there is such confusion in practice.