Moscow blocked the budget of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as well as central personnel issues. Individual countries are therefore joining forces to finance important tasks bypassing Russia.
The OSCE includes 57 states from Europe and Central Asia as well as the USA and Canada. Their representatives sat down at a table in Lodz.
The current and future chairman of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) appeared in front of the television cameras in the Polish city of Lodz on Friday with disappointed faces. Poland’s Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau announced that there was no final declaration this year and no documents signed by all 57 member states. “It’s the most difficult year in the history of the organization, the reason is well known,” said Rau, referring to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. However, a large majority of OSCE members basically agree.
Poland had caused a stir in the run-up to the ministerial meeting by refusing an entry visa to Russian representative Sergei Lavrov. This did not meet with everyone’s approval; Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, for example, criticized the measure as making little sense because Poland had poured fuel on the fire. However, Russia had already obstructed the organization by blocking the organization’s budget for months and getting in the way on personnel issues and the question of the OSCE chairmanship for 2024. Moscow was represented in Lodz by its ambassador Alexander Lukashevich.
Despite the dissent with Russia, neither Rau nor the future chairman Bujar Osmani, the foreign minister of North Macedonia, wanted to speak of a failure. Rau referred to a joint statement by the so-called OSCE Troika, which includes Poland and North Macedonia as well as Sweden, the country that held the presidency last year. A statement was also adopted by 43 of the 57 member states, which criticized Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the associated human rights violations. Both papers made it clear how torn the organization is, 47 years after the Helsinki Final Act laid the foundations for it.
Secretary General Helga Schmid, the committed top German diplomat whose mandate expires in 2024, referred to the possibility of continuing to work even without a budget. In Ukraine, for example, after Russia forced the withdrawal of the two OSCE observer missions in Donbass and on the border with Crimea, thanks to voluntary contributions from individual governments, a mission was reestablished in Kyiv, which currently has 60 employees.
How the approximately 3,500 employees of the 14 OSCE missions from Southeast Europe to Central Asia are to be financed in the future remains an open question. Since all decisions must be taken unanimously, Russia has a de facto right of veto.