Russia prepares to suspend its participation in the OSCE

The Russian Parliament has taken the first step to suspend the country's participation in the multilateral organization that ensures peace in the Old Continent, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

The State Duma (Lower House) granted its approval this Tuesday, although the final decision will be formalized simultaneously with the Federation Council (Upper House) on February 21.

“Today we declare our position in public for the first time so that it is known in the parliaments of the OSCE countries,” said the head of the Duma committee for international affairs and candidate for the Russian presidential elections, Leonid Slutski.

Moscow is not definitively leaving the organization, but it is freezing its participation due to the criticism received, as it has already done in other international organizations and treaties, including several European conventions for the defense of human rights, after being expelled from the Council of Europe in March 2022 for the attack against Ukraine.

“After the victory in the Northern Military District [the war unleashed against kyiv] we will see the position of these gentlemen.

I do not rule out that we return in the future,” said Slutski.

“It is time to say goodbye to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly,” stressed, for his part, the president of the Duma, Viacheslav Volodin, while regretting that Russia financed the organization.

“They dance to the tune of Washington,” the senior official said, “the OSCE is as politicized as the Council of Europe.

They talk about democracy, but they themselves do not follow any procedure, rule or principle.”

Beyond possible human rights violations by member countries (a total of 57), OSCE missions have documented irregularities in electoral processes and civilian deaths in conflicts since their founding in 1975, including war in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022.

One of the OSCE's tasks is to monitor electoral transparency.

Their observers have been banned for the first time in the Russian presidential elections from March 15 to 17, also pioneers in the use of controversial online voting to elect the Russian head of state.

The opposition and some members of the Communist Party denounced in the 2021 parliamentary elections that this system facilitated electoral fraud, and Vladimir Putin will now compete with all opposition rivals in exile, in jail or removed by the central electoral commission.

“This unfortunate decision by the Kremlin should not be taken in isolation.

It occurs with the intensification of repression within Russia against those who peacefully dissent,” the deputy head of the US delegation to the OSCE Permanent Council, Katherine Brucker, denounced in early February.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova responded in turn that the OSCE “does not have the authority to certify or issue verdicts on the elections.”

“Its Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights is only one of the possible international actors in the field of electoral monitoring,” added the Russian representative after stating that the elections will be supervised “by more than a thousand” observers.

Presumably, the same ones that validated in 2022 the illegal annexation referendums of the occupied territories in Ukraine under bombs and with the majority of its inhabitants away due to the war.

The Kremlin joins in its rejection of the OSCE's electoral supervision of the vetoes of the Azerbaijan regime, where its leader, Sergei Aliyev, won 92% of the votes in the presidential elections organized last week;

and Belarus for the legislative elections on February 25.

This ban is not new for Alexandr Lukashenko: he also did not invite OSCE observers in the 2020 Belarusian presidential elections, where his victory with an alleged 80% of the votes provoked the rebellion of the population in harshly repressed demonstrations.

Witness the deaths of civilians in Donbas by both sides

“The OSCE works to achieve and maintain stability, peace and democracy for more than 1 billion people through political dialogue and projects on the ground,” the organization recalls on its website.

One of its most important missions was that of Ukraine, which witnessed, day after day, the violations of the truce agreed in the east of the country between 2014 and 2022 due to the confrontation between the army and pro-Russian separatists.

The agency's reports refuted one of the Kremlin's pretexts for launching its offensive almost two years ago: an alleged genocide perpetrated by kyiv in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

In 2021, the year Putin began deploying hundreds of thousands of soldiers around Ukraine, there were 91 victims — 16 dead and 75 wounded;

and 47% of the total accidentally due to mines—adding those on both sides of the demarcation that divided Donbas between the territory controlled by Ukraine and that of the separatists led militarily and politically by Moscow.

The number of victims was lower each year: 134 in 2020 —51% due to mines—;

more than 200 in 2018 and 2019 —33% due to mines—;

and about 450 in 2016 and 2017, when there were still sporadic battles, such as a failed separatist offensive on Avdiivka.

The work of the OSCE observer corps in Ukraine came to an end on March 31, 2022. “I deeply regret that we could not reach an agreement to extend the mandate of this special monitoring mission due to the position of the Russian Federation ”, lamented then its current president, the Polish Foreign Minister, Zbigniew Rau.

“This mission has played a crucial role over the past eight years in providing objective information on the humanitarian and security situation on the ground,” he added.

A month later, four OSCE members were detained in the Russian-occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Moscow's spokesman for the OSCE warned last week that peace will only return to Europe if all its demands are met.

“The solution to the current European crisis involves guaranteeing adequate military, economic and political conditions for the development of Russia and our ally Belarus.

Respect for their interests and the end of Western support for the neo-Nazi regime in kyiv,” said Russia's deputy representative to the OSCE, Alexander Volgaryov, on Tuesday.

Before launching the offensive on Ukraine, the Kremlin demanded that NATO not only reject Ukraine's accession, but also abandon all its partners east of the German border.

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