Recently at least three children died and two others were wounded as a direct result of the warring sides’ failure to cease fire and to de-mine as they promised they would in 2014.
These children are but a few of the growing tally of civilian casualties in eastern Ukraine. Since the beginning of the year, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s special monitoring mission has confirmed almost 200 civilians as either killed or injured. The OSCE SMM has also recorded over 200,000 ceasefire violations in 2018, and almost 3,000 weapons in violation of agreed withdrawal lines. It has facilitated and monitored repairs to civilian infrastructure over 820 times.
Indisputable facts are established by more than 700 civilian monitoring officers aided by unmanned aerial vehicles and cameras, outlined every day in publicly available OSCE SMM reports. Every day – in black and white – a painful picture of reality is shown, visible to anyone who cares to see.
And yet there are those who still refuse to see, for whom facts don’t matter. Despite the reality, they choose to focus on the actions of the other side. All they want to know is who fired first. All they want to do is point the finger of blame.
Instead of reality, they see a blame game, filtering facts through historical and political narratives, warping them in a prism of their own making.
They ask – and indeed sometimes pre-determine – for whom does the bell toll, forgetting that this conflict affects and impacts on everyone equally, regardless of what side of the contact line they are on, what religion they profess, what language they speak, or what political views they hold, if any at all.
The bullets and bombs the OSCE SMM records in eastern Ukraine, day and night, do not discriminate, falling on civilians, regardless of class or creed, or age or sex. Many of them children. Many too old to flee. And many too poor to leave.
The reality is: the bell tolls for all of them.
The reality is one of the traumatized civilians – regardless of which side or what religion or language or even views – being incessantly exposed to the danger of imminent violence, and many suffering.
The facts established by the OSCE SMM tell the story of farmers injured in the fields; reaping their harvest only to find unexploded ordnance and anti-tank mines. Of mothers killed as they shop for groceries. Of children – mostly small boys – growing up without a leg. Of random, unpredictable violence; stray bullets and mortars crashing through the front windows of people’s homes.
Facts matter because they tell the story of the daily grind and utter misery that has been imposed on millions – of hours if not days just to reach a hospital or get one’s pension.
It’s the story of an uncertain if not non-existent legal and judicial space, where law and order have broken down and have at best been replaced by illegal structures claiming legal legitimacy. Think what that would feel like and mean for you and your family if this happened to you.
It is an extraordinary situation; part of a European country experiencing convulsion and conflict: displacement, destruction, death.
After four-and-a-half years of establishing facts and reporting on them – after four-and-a-half years of hundreds of monitoring officers in the field and unmanned aerial vehicles in the sky – it is clear what the story of the Donbas is.
It’s a story of everyone on the ground losing; of largely static lines and trenches stretching along hundreds of kilometers of ground. The 21st-century recreation of battlefields not seen in Europe for a century. It’s the story of how a part of Europe has been drawn into a zero-sum game. The facts we present every day – as relentless as the conflict itself – tell the story of a place that has retreated into the past.
The facts are indisputable.
They tell of once vibrant towns and cities – sustained by steel and coal – falling deeper and deeper into economic decay; where dependency has become the norm for hundreds of thousands of people – if not millions; where running water is no longer a given; where gas is no longer necessarily available; where darkness falls on everyone regardless of views or language or flag.
The OSCE SMM has done its part. It has done its job. It has deployed. It has monitored. It has established the facts. It has reported them every day on the OSCE website in three languages – English, Ukrainian, and Russian. And it has told the story of the crisis in and around Ukraine. It has delivered the message.
There are people in control. Sometimes with; sometimes without legal sanction. People nonetheless who make decisions.
Decision-makers. It’s well beyond time that they got that message: if you have power, you have accountability; if you break it; you fix it; violence must end.
By contrast, there is an increasingly large number of people on the ground who have gotten the message. At the local level – whether in Luhansk or Lviv – people’s eyes are open. There is a realization that people must deal with realities. Opposing historically-constructed and politically-fueled narratives, people on the ground realize, cannot be the basis of defining a common future.
Everywhere, all across Ukraine, people want to find a way forward. Everywhere, there are people who realize that for every dollar spent on bullets and bombs, there is one less for peace; people committed to economic development, environmental and social protection, and equal rights for all, regardless of ethnicity, language or gender; people clued into reality who are beyond binary thinking, beyond the zero-sum game, beyond black and white.
Although largely static, the facts also tell us that this conflict is far from frozen. Escalation is as likely as resolution. Nobody can foresee.
But no one – least of all the decision-makers – should be blind to the facts. We can sleepwalk into more violence or seize opportunities to end it.
Alexander Hug has completed his assignment as deputy head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s special monitoring mission, and leaves the post on Oct. 31. He joined the OSCE SMM in March 2014, shortly after Russia launched its military invasion of Ukraine, starting with the illegal seizure of the Crimean peninsula and continuing in the eastern Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. The war has killed more than 10,500 Ukrainians and displaced 1.5 million people.
