The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest regional security-oriented intergovernmental organization. needs to reform its rules and cancel the Russian Federation’s membership, or face the reality it may no longer be able to play its designed role of keeping Europe safe and at peace , Ukraine’s top diplomat said on April 9.
“Russia’s unjustified aggression and atrocities shattered the very basics of the Helsinki final act. Russia’s participation in the @OSCE is a threat to security and cooperation in Europe. If OSCE lacks appropriate suspension mechanisms, then set up a procedure and get them out,” Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba said in a Saturday Twitter statement.
The Helsinki Final Act signed in 1975 created the OSCE. Its main goals at the time were to provide a platform for negotiation between Cold War opponents and to confirm the inviolability and permanence of states and borders existing in Europe. The Soviet Union was a key signatory, a role taken up by the RF after the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1989.
In 2014 the OSCE deployed international observers, among them RF nationals, to monitor a ceasefire line between Ukraine Armed Forces (UAF) units and combat formations led by RF officers and funded by the RF government, in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Kuleba and other Ukrainian officials repeatedly criticized the OSCE mission in Ukraine for bias, because the OSCE employed staff sent by the RF government as purportedly neutral observers, to monitor a war started and financed by the Kremlin. They have claimed the RF again grossly violated Helsinki Agreement terms by launching a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
During the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian ceasefire talks Ukrainian negotiators have named iron-clad security guarantees to Ukraine as an absolute condition for any peace agreement. Ukrainian diplomats have flatly rejected the OSCE’s participation in any security guarantee mechanism because, in their view, the RF is responsible for the death of thousands of Ukrainians by sending its army into Ukraine, and at the same time an OSCE member purportedly committed to European peace and respect of state sovereignty.
On April 1 the RF effectively shut down the OSCE mission in Ukraine by refusing to vote for its continuation. By the OSCE charter, field missions may only be financed by a unanimous vote of OSCE members, including Russia.
In order for the OSCE to reform itself per Kuleba’s suggestion, so that a member might be kicked out, by present OSCE statute Moscow would have to agree to the change.
The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (SMM) at its heyday was a massive and ambitious mission employing more than 1,500 local and international staff deployed across Ukraine, launching dozens of ground patrols daily along the line of contact and operating on a budget of 100 million Euros a year.
Now the OSCE Ukraine mission is reduced to a few dozen international caretaker staff on short-term salaries, former and still-employed mission members told Kyiv Post.
