The death on April 23 in the Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine of Joseph Stone, an American citizen and monitor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, is unlikely to significantly change the course of Russia’s war on Ukraine, analysts believe.
Stone was killed in a suspected landmine explosion on territory controlled by Russian-backed forces. In the three years since the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine began working, he is the first mission member to lose his life while on duty. The war in the Donbas has to date claimed some 10,000 lives.
“The death of the OSCE observer is alas, a human tragedy but a geopolitical irrelevance,” Mark Galeotti, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague, told the Kyiv Post. “There is no likelihood that it will lead to the kind of serious and sustained pressure that would be needed to force Moscow into changing its approach on the Donbas.”
Isolated casualties
Stone, 36, was travelling in an OSCE armored vehicle with two colleagues when it is believed to have struck a roadside landmine near the village of Pryshyb in a part of the Luhansk Oblast controlled by Russian-backed forces, some 800 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
The American’s colleagues, a German and Czech national, were wounded and hospitalized. In the wake of the tragedy, the international community renewed its calls for both sides of the conflict to abide by the Minsk peace deal – signed in February 2015 – and placed special emphasis on the role of Moscow in assisting a probe into Stone’s death.
“The United States urges Russia to use its influence with the separatists to allow the OSCE to conduct a full, transparent, and timely investigation,” read a U.S. State Department statement released on April 23. “This incident makes clear the need for all sides – and particularly the Russian-led separatist forces – to implement their commitments under the Minsk Agreements immediately.”
But a bigger reaction from the West that would see more sanctions on Russia, or greater pressure on either it or Ukraine to take further steps to achieve peace, is unlikely, according to observers.
“The death of the OSCE monitor will not change the general situation in the Donbas in geopolitical terms,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Centre for Political Studies. “These are isolated casualties, and we have seen such casualties on more than once occasion in similar conflicts in other countries.
“At the moment then is no basis to unambiguously assert that this was an action undertaken with the specific aim of killing a member of the OSCE. That’s why the reaction to the incident from the OSCE itself, as well as from various international organizations, has been restrained.”
Extra measures
In an April 25 post on its Facebook page, the OSCE said it had resumed its activities in the Donbas with extra measures in place to ensure monitors’ security. The mission reported seeing ceasefire violations and long queues at checkpoints along the contact line between Ukrainian and separatist forces.
For Fesenko, the question of the international watchdog’s safety will now take center stage.
“As a result of the death of the OSCE monitor there will be just two consequences,” he told the Kyiv Post. “A strengthening of security measures in the work of the OSCE mission in the Donbas and a demand for greater guarantees of security for the mission in the conflict zone.”
The OSCE has said it will wait for the results of an investigation before apportioning blame for Stone’s death. In Ukraine, officials have pointed the finger squarely at Russia and the forces it backs. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has called for a transparent and swift probe to be held, but according to Galeotti, the statements coming from the Kremlin’s proxy forces show that Russia does not see the OSCE casualties as a reason to take meaningful action.
“The quick claim that it happened because the OSCE vehicle deviated from its safe, approved route gives us a sense of the Russian approach, which will be to present it as ‘just one of those things,’ a sad accident, but one that ultimately was the team’s own fault,” Galeotti said.
