Translated material
Another year wasted
Russia insists on reforming the OSCE
Today the 14th Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE Foreign Ministers) opens in Brussels. Russia is represented at the two-day forum by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. His deputy, Alexander Grushko, who oversees the Euro-Atlantic direction at the Foreign Ministry, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, expressed the hope that the current Council of Foreign Ministers “will give impetus to a comprehensive reform of the organization.” “Without adapting to new realities, the OSCE may be pushed to the periphery of international politics. Reform is the key to the survival of the OSCE,” Mr. Grushko is convinced.Geographically, the OSCE stretches from Vancouver to Vladivostok: the organization includes 55 states - all European countries, the USA, Canada, the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus. However, the organization’s work is now focused exclusively on the Balkans and the post-Soviet space. In functional terms, there has been a clear bias in the work of the OSCE towards humanitarian problems to the detriment of economic and military-political issues.
“We regret that another year has actually been wasted in the area of arms control,” Alexander Grushko noted to Vremya Novostei. In particular, he said, the Vienna Document on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures in Europe, adopted in 1990, is “not developing.” At the same time, NATO countries “under far-fetched pretexts” are blocking the process of ratification of the Agreement on the Adaptation of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed in 1999 in Istanbul.
The OSCE was formed in 1975 as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Over the past 30 years, the organization has not had its own charter. At the end of November, the heads of the Foreign Ministries of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan addressed the OSCE Ministerial Council. They expressed "concern and disappointment" about the fact that now "the interests of OSCE participating States are mainly realized through other mechanisms of international cooperation." The seven post-Soviet republics called for completing the process of transforming the OSCE into an international organization, developing a charter and adopting a convention, “which would give the reformed OSCE legal personality.”
True, even before the start of the meeting, the director of the information and press department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Mikhail Kamynin, noted that the chances of agreeing in Brussels on a consensus text of a general political declaration and statements on regional issues are slim “due to disagreements on the so-called frozen conflicts” in the post-Soviet space. Moscow intends to prevent references in the Ministerial Council documents to “Istanbul commitments” on the withdrawal of Russian weapons from Moldova and Georgia or linking this topic with the ratification of the Agreement on Adaptation of the CFE Treaty.