Summing up Ukraine's 2013 OSCE Chairmanship

Coming on the heels of Ukraine’s decision to suspend its participation in the EU Association process – not to mention the outbreak of “Euro-maidan” protests across the country - the 2013 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Ministerial Council in Kyiv attracted unusual international attention. Although senior officials from European Union (EU) countries, Russia, and the United States were in attendance, the conclusion of OSCE business appeared perfunctory, with greater energy from all sides focused on the drama unfolding outside on the street, and the ongoing negotiations between Ukraine and its neighbors to the east and west. Despite the high stakes political theater surrounding it, the Ministerial Conference was in fact not without substantive accomplishments, albeit fewer than many would have hoped to see—a characterization that could apply more broadly to Ukraine’s Chairmanship.

Kyiv’s stewardship of the OSCE represented an opportunity for it to advance a substantive agenda for the benefit of the entire Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community. Of at least equal importance for Ukraine’s leaders, the OSCE Chairmanship was a rare and high profile platform from which to demonstrate the country’s capacity for vision and leadership on difficult international problems.

Although the OSCE is comparatively little known in Western Europe and North America, it is renowned as the institutional embodiment of the Helsinki Final Act throughout Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Ukraine’s Chairmanship—only the third time a former Soviet republic has held this position, after Kazakhstan in 2010 and Lithuania in 2011—was of great symbolic importance. At the same time, Ukraine’s center-stage role in the negotiations leading up to the Vilnius summit of the EU’s Eastern Partnership gave Kyiv an additional opportunity to capture the spotlight with an inspiring vision, energetic diplomacy, and skillful crisis management.

So, at the end of its Chairmanship year, how did Kyiv stack up?

Although Ukraine’s OSCE Chairmanship fell far short of its initially high potential for ambition and achievement, it was not a total loss. Indeed, in the context of an extremely difficult year for Ukraine’s relations with major regional powers, most notably Russia, Kyiv showed some adroitness in averting major embarrassment or institutional crisis for the OSCE during the Chairmanship. To get a better sense of this mixed outcome, let us take a closer look at what the OSCE achieved under Ukrainian leadership this year, what opportunities were missed, and why.

A Slow and Shaky Start

At the outset of the Chairmanship year, the Ukrainian government complicated its own management task by switching leadership. In December 2012, Foreign Minister Konstyantyn Gryshchenko, who had served from the beginning of Yanukovich’s term in early 2010, was moved to the position of Deputy Prime Minister, and replaced by Leonid Kozhara, a well-known figure in the Party of Regions and leader of the Party’s foreign policy team in the Rada. This meant that while Gryshchenko had initial responsibility for establishing the OSCE task force in Kyiv, and preparing priorities for the Chairmanship, it was Kozhara who formally took up the position at the beginning of 2013. Although the two Ministers’ statements about Ukraine’s Chairmanship priorities were substantially similar, there were notable differences, such as the disappearance of Gryshchenko’s priority on the need for reconciliation to build trust in the OSCE space.

Critics frequently noted that the Ukrainian Chairmanship seemed unduly slow to take decisions, and often withheld approval for even routine meetings or seminars until the very last minute. Though this pattern is arguably typical of Ukrainian practice in domestic and foreign affairs more broadly, there can be little doubt that the changing of the guard at the outset of Ukraine’s Chairmanship introduced new elements of uncertainty and delay early in the year. Given Ukraine’s acute financial difficulties in 2013, it may also be no surprise that the Chairmanship was seen to be under-resourced and lacking in bandwidth to address day-to-day exigencies of organizational leadership. Harder to explain was the Ukrainian Chairmanship’s difficulty in coordinating with the past and incoming Chairmanships—Ireland, Switzerland and Serbia—a chance for high-level diplomatic engagement that was arguably among the main benefits to Ukraine of taking on the Chairmanship.

Despite these limitations and the intense controversy stemming from Ukraine’s withdrawal from the EU Association signing process before the Vilnius summit, preparations for the December 5-6 Kyiv Ministerial Council appeared to be well managed. The summit itself capped off a year of halting progress in each of the three OSCE dimensions, and delivered decisions on several important issues. In the end, though, the Ukrainian Chairmanship could hardly avoid heightened scrutiny on its own record of conduct towards escalating public protests in Kyiv and around the country.

Priorities

In the politico-military dimension, Ukraine had identified progress on Transnistria conflict resolution as its top priority, and with good reason since the conflict is located in Ukraine’s backyard, complicating Kyiv’s trade and security relations with Moldova, Russia, Romania and others. Although official dialogue continued in the OSCE-mediated 5+2 format, little concrete progress was achieved over the course of the year, aside from minor technical agreements. These were easily offset by the constriction of OSCE mission activities in the region imposed by the Transnistrian side, which Ukraine appeared unable to reverse. Given inflexibility from both Chisinau and Tiraspol, and occasionally inflammatory moves by Russia and Romania, the geopolitics offered little hope for major progress in 2013. Yet the OSCE would at least have been better served by more direct and consistent attention from the Chairmanship, especially since Ukraine is formally a “guarantor” party in the 5+2 process. In the event, the Chairmanship appointed only a single special representative for all protracted conflicts, who was himself a highly skilled diplomat, but was simply physically unable to give adequate attention to Transnistria as well as the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia.

With Ukrainian urging, the Kyiv Ministerial Council adopted a cyber-security declaration welcoming “confidence building measures to reduce conflict stemming from information and communication technologies.” This was in addition to some notable progress on Ukraine’s stated priority of energy security, including a decision recognizing the “trans-boundary impact that energy production, transportation and consumption have on the environment, and encourage[ing] the use of renewables, energy efficiency measures and innovation.” The Ministerial Council also adopted a decision extending the OSCE’s support for activities to protect critical energy infrastructure. Though politically and rhetorically important in their reaffirmation of established principles, none of these statements on energy security broke new ground for the OSCE.

The Human Dimension

As expected, the human dimension was by far the most complex, controversial and fraught for the Ukrainian Chairmanship in 2013. For example, following the presidential elections in Azerbaijan in October, the Office of Democratic Initiatives and Human Rights (ODIHR) issued a strongly worded statement based on the work of its election observer mission, which was critical of the government’s conduct of the vote. The statement cited “significant problems” and “serious shortcomings” on and before election-day, including “limitations on the freedoms of expression, assembly and association that did not guarantee a level playing field for candidates…continued allegations of candidate and voter intimidation and a restrictive media environment [which] marred the campaign.” Yet the Ukrainian Chairmanship did not permit the ODIHR to speak for the OSCE, instead issuing its own statement that merely noted the observers’ findings, while offering congratulations to the Azerbaijani government, and lauding the country’s latest progress towards OSCE standards for free and fair elections. Anyone who followed the election could see how this statement effectively and unnecessarily undermined the unity of the OSCE’s position for the sake of Kyiv’s bilateral relationship with Baku.

Similarly, in welcoming participating states to the Ministerial Council in Kyiv, the Chairmanship diluted OSCE principles and best practices by stressing Ukraine’s naked political interest in a warning to foreign diplomats against “outside intervention” in the clashes between street protestors and the government. Of course, neither Foreign Minister Kozhara nor any other Ukrainian leader could prevent foreign diplomats from speaking out about the protests and the authorities’ forceful response. Despite these tensions, there was some progress as the Kyiv meeting was the first to produce decisions on any human dimension issue since Astana in 2010. The Council issued three decisions: the first highlighted the “importance of prosecution, protection, prevention and partnerships in combating [human] trafficking;” the second urged “OSCE States to address discrimination and intolerance against Roma and Sinti;” and the third addressed “legal personality of religious communities, state registration, inter-faith dialogue, discrimination in public institutions and the protection of religious sites.”

Summing up

In all, the Ukrainian Chairmanship was hardly an abject failure. The Chairmanship task force demonstrated basic administrative competence, albeit without the ambition, enthusiasm or creativity for which some had hoped. Attention was paid to each of the OSCE’s three dimensions, and the Ministerial Council accordingly produced substantive statements in each area, more than might be said of other year-end conferences. Yet in some cases, the Ukrainians found it impossible to elevate the Chairmanship’s lofty responsibilities above their own urgent national interests, as with the election in Azerbaijan and the Euro-maidan protests in Ukraine itself. Ironically, the Ukrainians might have done well to take a page from the old Soviet playbook: A dose of “samokritika” (self-criticism) might have enhanced Ukraine’s own credibility and strengthened the standing of the OSCE.

For additional reading on this topic please see:
The OSCE: Fighting for Renewed Relevance
The OSCE-Mediterranean Partnership and the Arab Uprisings
Election Monitoring Faces Credibility Crisis