OSCE may collapse over Belarus, Russia’s reluctance to approve Estonia’s presidency, says Finnish MFA
According to the OSCE’s rules, the rotating chairmanship of the organization must be approved by all 57 member states, but Russia and Belarus did not support Estonia’s candidacy for next year’s chairmanship.
Read also: Ukraine to boycott OSCE Parliamentary Assembly in Vienna because of Russian participation
At the same time, Estonia is not ready to give up its candidacy.
The OSCE may collapse before Finland takes over the chairmanship in 2025, Haavisto said, adding that the situation was serious.
“If there is no chairman in 2024 and there is no consensus on this issue, the next year will be the year of the OSCE’s destruction as an organization,” the minister said.
Read also: Russia attempting to hold OSCE hostage, chairman says
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was established in Budapest, Hungary, in 1994, when a series of meetings on European security and cooperation developed into an organization.
The organization sent a monitoring mission to Ukraine at the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2014, at the beginning of Russia’s illegal military occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea.
The mission was to oversee a ceasefire and the implementation of the Minsk peace accords, but the ceasefire was continually broken – most often by Russia, according to OSCE reports – and the accords were never implemented.
The mission ended its operations in March 2022 following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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