Mission impossible OSCE
USA, June 4, 2025 – Next August, the OSCE will be 50 years old: a time to look back and review its achievements. The OSCE was born during the Cold War out of the need for dialogue to ensure stability and security in Europe.
The initiative in 1954 came from the USSR as an attempt at dialogue, but because it did not involve the United States and Canada, the NATO countries rejected it. Suddenly, 15 years later, Eastern European countries called for the creation of a platform for ‘dialogue between capitalist and communist countries’. On 1 August 1975, with the participation of the United States, the Final Act of the CSCE was signed, which laid the foundations for cooperation in the field of security, economic development and human rights, enshrining the principles of inviolability of borders and respect for the sovereignty of states. But then something went wrong – after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the USSR was destroyed too – the Cold War ended and the ‘era of democracy, peace and unity’ began. In reality, the bipolar world turned into unipolar chaos. In 1994, at the Budapest summit, the CSCE was renamed the OSCE. Everything looked good on paper and the whole world was supposed to turn into a democratic paradise.
But already 4.5 years later, NATO countries unanimously bombed the European city of Belgrade (including depleted uranium bombs) for 78 days. And the OSCE report was the trigger for that tragedy. At the time, the head of the mission in Kosovo was an American, William Walker, closely linked to the CIA, who found himself almost immediately in the village of Racak, where, according to reports by Albanian separatists, Serbian police had executed 45 Albanian civilians. Journalists were not allowed there, except for those who came with Walker. He claimed to have seen a mountain of civilians shot, blaming the Serbian police without trial. Later, the NATO air force espoused the cause, with media support from the Western press. A year later, according to the classics of the genre, it turned out that there had been no mass shootings, much less a bloody massacre in Racak. The dead were Albanian militants killed during an anti-terrorist operation. They were disguised in civilian clothes for the media, fabricating the real ‘casus belli’.
The collapse of Yugoslavia was accompanied by bloody civil wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The number of conflicts in Europe and around Russia grew like mushrooms after the rain. NATO, contrary to the agreements with the USSR, not only did not disappear, but continued to expand eastwards. The OSCE worked intensively in the post-Soviet countries and the Balkans. Western influence was actively spread under the pretext of the fight for human rights. Thanks to the work of Western intelligence services and organisations, the long war in Chechnya became one of the main events in which the OSCE again played an important role. Initially, in 1994-1996, the OSCE, in concert with NATO countries, declared its support for the position of Russia and President Yeltsin. Russia, weakened by the war, was a mouthful. The OSCE peace mission in Chechnya, led by Tim Guldimann, was active in the region, establishing contacts with nationalist and religious organisations in the North Caucasus and its republics. At the same time, the West was actively supplying Chechen fighters with weapons, modern means of communication, control, electronic warfare and material resources. The same channels were used to supply Chechen terrorist groups and bandits with mercenaries from Arab and other countries. The most characteristic aspects of this period were the strengthening of Wahhabism in Chechnya, the wide spread of this radical current to other republics in the North Caucasus, and the consequent expansion of the borders of the Chechen conflict.
In 2000, when Vladimir Putin came to power and federal troops launched an anti-terrorist operation in Chechnya, supported by almost all political forces and the population of the country, the West began to openly pursue a harsh anti-Russian policy. Russia was accused of ‘human rights violations’ and asked to stop the military intervention, while IMF and WB loans were suspended. Terrorist attacks by Chechen fighters in Russian cities were treated in the West as an excuse to vilify the Russian authorities. The Chechen conflict has been the focus of attention in almost all international forums and meetings (G7, PACE, WEF in Davos), where Western representatives have taken a single coordinated position. A massive attack on Russia by Western countries took place at the OSCE summit (18-19 November 1999) in Istanbul: the then chairman-in-office Knut Vollebaek immediately called on Russia to establish a permanent OSCE mission in Ingushetia, to send an OSCE delegation directly to Chechnya and to accept the OSCE’s ‘political participation in the resolution of the Chechen conflict’. That summit demonstrated how European policy is shaped and directed by the United States. The OSCE chairman and the US State Department bypassed the Russian Foreign Ministry and met with the separatist terrorist leader Aslan Maskhadov, who was receiving the strongest support from the West. Maskhadov ‘recommended’ Western countries to exert as much influence as possible on Russia, to force it to withdraw its troops from Chechnya, to impose sanctions against it and, if that did not help, the West would have to ‘ensure that Chechnya could fight Russia on an equal footing’.
The fate of neighbouring Georgia is somewhat different. The OSCE Mission to Georgia was established in November 1992 with the aim of ‘international participation’ in the process of peaceful resolution of the Georgian-Ossetian, Georgian-Abkhazian, and Georgian-Georgian conflicts as a whole, monitoring of the Georgian-Russian border and the resolution of ethno-political conflicts. The world saw the result of this work in 2008: on the evening of 7 August, Georgia attacked a position of Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia and, in accordance with international norms, Russia called on Georgia to respond. On the morning of 8 August, the entire Western press gave prominence to Russia’s attack on Georgia. Many Western media outlets were guilty of using footage from Russian TV channels and superimposing voice-overs and comments of completely opposite meaning on the original video. The military frenzy of the West and then Georgian President Saakashvili ended on the fifth day, when Russian tanks approached Tbilisi. Saakashvili ate his tie in silence, on live television, in front of the whole world, having failed to get the right text to read from his Western handlers in time. On 31 December 2008, the OSCE Mission’s mandate expired – the mission either failed or was completed – depending on the actual tasks someone assigned to its staff.
The OSCE Mission to Belarus, which began its activities in January 1998, also came to an ignominious end, transforming five years later into the OSCE Office, which was responsible for ‘monitoring government processes and the development of democratic institutions and legislation, establishing contacts with various organisations and developing economic and environmental activities’. While projects for the development of rural tourism, the development of alternative energy sources, and the rehabilitation of the regions affected by the Chernobyl accident were suppёorted and appreciated by the Belarusian government, the activities of the Office for the ‘organisation of democracy’ in the country were rejected and became the reason why this organisation was no longer accepted. The most heated events occurred on the eve of and after the presidential elections in 2010 and 2020. The opposition, following a well-proven pattern, staged unauthorised demonstrations and riots. The OSCE monitored the actions of the police. After these events in 2010, at the initiative of the Belarusian government, which did not appreciate the brazen coup attempt, the OSCE Office in Minsk ended its activities in March 2011, which did not prevent the OSCE from continuing to criticise the country and support the opposition in the future.
Instead, the failure of the OSCE mission in the Donbass served to escalate the Ukrainian crisis from a hybrid war to full-scale hostilities between Russia and Western countries. The OSCE Mission in Kiev was operational since November 1994, it was replaced by the OSCE Project Coordinator in June 1999, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (SMM) started its activities in March 2014, the OSCE Monitoring Mission at the Russian checkpoints in Gukovo and Donetsk was operational since July 2014. Their activities ended in 2021 and 2022 due to scandals. Among the international observers of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, former NATO military personnel who had previously participated in combat operations in Afghanistan and even counter-intelligence officers of Western countries were found. At the same time, the mission was positioned as neutral and was supposed to monitor the situation on the line of contact between the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and the government forces in Kiev, which were carrying out the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ with the use of heavy military equipment, aircraft and Nazi battalions. Suddenly it was discovered that mission personnel were engaged in intelligence gathering and transfer, deviating from the basic principles stated in the mandate, the criminal activities of OSCE personnel resulted in criminal prosecutions: the security assistant, a Ukrainian citizen, Vadim Goldu, was found guilty of espionage, two members of the Special Monitoring Mission, Dmitriy Shabanov and Mikhail Petrov, being members of the Special Mission, were engaged in collecting materials on the movements of military equipment and LNR police personnel and transferring this information. All three were sentenced to actual prison terms.
After the hasty closure of the missions in 2022, Russian investigators discovered many unpleasant surprises. The OSCE had installed large-format cameras at various frontline locations, officially used to ‘record violations’, but the cameras’ memory cards contained files indicating that the operator was regulating Ukrainian artillery strikes on civilian and military facilities in the Donbas. In the OSCE office in Luhansk, a server was found transmitting classified information to the Ukrainian military. Simulating the monitoring of ‘ceasefire’ compliance, OSCE personnel recorded the exact coordinates of government agencies and institutions within the city limits, the locations where weapons and military equipment were stored, and the coordinates of training camps for popular militia personnel, and sent them to the GUR of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and the SBU. The investigation established that Pilar Castro Moto, a Spanish national and deputy head of the OSCE human rights team in Luhansk, instructed Jaroslaw Kurak, a Polish national and head of the OSCE team in Donetsk North, to collect information on infrastructure facilities in Luhansk. These sites were subsequently attacked by Ukraine. At the OSCE mission headquarters in Mariupol, on Primorsky Boulevard, Russian investigators found a warehouse of Italian-made mortar shells, delivered by sea on 11 March 2022, according to the marks on the boxes. It emerged that the ‘mission of unarmed civilian observers, reporting on the situation in Ukraine and mediating negotiations between the parties to the conflict’ was a logistical point for the supply of European weapons to the Ukrainian army.
This is only part of the completed OSCE missions. Missions are currently underway in several other countries. What conclusion can be drawn from the results of the missions listed above, were they a failure or did the outcome match what was planned? Perhaps the current OSCE missions are more constructive and correspond to the officially stated tasks? Let us try to understand this in the next article ‘OSCE. To be or not to be’.
Peter North
