OSCE: That’s like Giving the Bank Robber the Key to the Vault

It was too astonishing to believe! Many anecdotes can illustrate this ludicrous gambit but the one about giving the bank robber the key to the vault is appropriate.

Apparently, some bureaucrat at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, formed in the mid-1970s to cool Cold War rhetoric and tie russia to human rights obligations, decided it would be appropriate to invite a representative of the evil empire to attend that 30^th Ministerial Meeting, which will be held in Macedonia November 30-December 1.

The countries that most visibly benefited from this historic agreement were astounded and loudly protested this ludicrous idea.

Three Baltic countries and Ukraine, former captive nations of russian subjugation said they won’t attend a meeting of the European security body OSCE after it invited russian foreign minister sergei lavrov to participate.

Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia said in a joint statement earlier this week they will shun the gathering of the 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It will only provide russia with yet another propaganda opportunity,” the countries’ foreign ministers said ahead of the meeting due in Skopje, North Macedonia, on Thursday and Friday. Ukraine also announced it won’t take part.

According to an interview with Bloomberg, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said earlier that the OSCE risks becoming “brain dead” as US and European allies bend to russia’s will by negotiating with Moscow over top jobs and which country will chair the organization. The body has offered Malta to take over as chair in a compromise after Moscow pushed back against Estonia, he said.

“We’re dancing to a fiddle that’s being played by Russians and I don’t agree with that,” Landsbergis said. “If there is an organization that could be called actually brain dead, we will very much have a chance to see the OSCE becoming this.”

A historic flashback. When then soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev agreed to Western countries’ requests for the inclusion of human rights provisions into what has become known as the Helsinki Accords, little did he realize how much trouble that would later cause for him. Up until then, human, religious, and national rights advocates in the Soviet Union based their demands on the United Nations Charter, the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the Soviet Constitution. The signing of the Helsinki Accords on August 1, 1975, produced a modern document, in which 35 countries, including the Soviet Union, reaffirmed their commitments to human rights. Incorporated into this new treaty were principles of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and national self-determination, among others.

Dissidents, human and national rights activists in the Evil Empire saw this document as an opportunity to present proof of repression of soviet russian authorities rather than a sell out to the kremlin.

This latest recommitment to human rights then became a bible of dissidents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. While not altogether abandoning references to U.N. treaties or the Soviet Constitution, in which human rights activists in the USSR have lost faith, dissidents behind the Iron Curtain began to use the Helsinki Accords as the basis of their conduct. The first meeting to review compliance with the Helsinki Accords was set for late 1977 and early 1978.

That preceding spring and summer delegates from the 35 countries had already begun to assemble to discuss the ground rules for reports and discussions later that year. Signatory governments were preparing lists of their countries' implementations of the Helsinki Accords and complaints against other states, which, they claimed, did not live up to the Accords. Besides governments, individual citizens and organizations also were busy collecting documented material on their government's violations of the human rights provisions of the Accords. With the possibility of publicly airing violations of basic rights at the CSCE talks, human rights advocates in the Soviet Union took advantage of this and formed what has become known as Helsinki monitoring groups. They hoped that the material they collected would be presented at the CSCE or would at least be made public around the world.

In late 1976 and early 1977, five public groups to promote the implementation of the Helsinki Accords were formed in five republics of the Soviet Union — Moscow, Russia; Kyiv, Ukraine; Tbilisi, Georgia; Vilnius, Lithuania; and in Armenia. Each public group earnestly began collecting documentation on the Kremlin's violations of the Helsinki Accords and established contacts with the West to relay their information to the free world. This, they hoped, would bring public pressure to bear down on the Soviet government, which would force it to cease denying its citizens their rights. Each group was and continues to be interested in human rights generally, but individually their objectives differed. The Moscow group, for instance, focused on civil and religious rights. The Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Georgian and Armenian groups also sought civil and religious rights, but they but they also advocated the implementation of the principle of national self-determination.

The document that has been studying russian violations of a broad range of rights is now on the verge of being corrupted by the presence of a high-level russian delegation, which has never changed its criminal approach to governance.

And now, in the joint statement, the Baltic nations said lavrov’s attendance at the meeting “risks legitimizing aggressor russia as a rightful member of our community of free nations, trivializing the atrocious crimes russia has been committing, and putting up with russia’s blatant violation and contempt of the OSCE.”

Ukraine said it will skip the session because russia “systemically” blocks consensus on key issues and turned the organization into “a hostage of its whims and aggression,” according to a statement from the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

Separately, Oleh Nikolenko, spokesman for the Ukrainian foreign ministry, wrote in a statement on Facebook that the Ukrainian delegation would not take part in the meeting.

Nikolenko said Russia had abused the rules of consensus in the organization, resorted to “blackmail and open threats” and had also been holding three Ukrainian OSCE representatives in prison for 500 days.

“In such conditions, the presence of a Russian delegation … at minister-level for the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine will only deepen the crisis into which Russia has driven the OSCE,” Nikolenko said.

“For the past two years we have witnessed how one OSCE participating state has actively and brutally tried to annihilate another,” the Baltic foreign ministers said in their statement. “Let us be very clear: russia’s war of aggression and atrocities against its sovereign and peaceful neighbor Ukraine blatantly violate international law.”

They also accused russia of “obstructive behavior within the OSCE itself,” citing russia’s prevention of an OSCE presence in Ukraine and the blocking of Estonia’s chairmanship of the organization in 2024. They also accused russia of “obstructive behavior within the OSCE itself,” citing russia’s prevention of an OSCE presence in Ukraine and the blocking of Estonia’s chairmanship of the organization in 2024. lavrov’s attendance at the Skopje meeting “risks legitimizing aggressor russia as a rightful member of our community of free nations, trivializing the atrocious crimes russia has been committing,” they added.

Speaking to reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels, North Macedonia’s foreign minister, Bujar Osmani, said he believed that he would be meeting Lavrov in Skopje. “Lavrov is not coming to Skopje, in a way. Lavrov is coming to the OSCE just as he went to (the) U.N. in New York a few months ago,” Osmani said. “I won’t be meeting him as the foreign minister of North Macedonia, but as the OSCE chairman in office.”

643 days of the latest russian war against Ukraine, at least, have demonstrated that russia doesn’t belong not only in the OCSE but also the United Nations. Self-respecting national leaders should not extend their hand to the kremlin’s killers and rapists.

If the murderous hoodlums from moscow are granted access to the 30th Session of the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe, then we might as well turn out the lights and close the door behind us. Its useful contributions to the global community are history.