The Russo-Ukrainian war monitoring mission from the Vienna-based Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has been unable to fulfill its principal mandate of documenting and recording violence in the Donbas. This is reportedly due to staff shortages and weak leadership, current and former mission monitors have told the Kyiv Post.
The so-called Minsk agreements, signed by Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany in 2014-15, provided a roadmap for a ceasefire in the Donbas (comprising Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Donetsk and Luhansk). They provided the OSCE, through a special monitoring mission (SMM), with a mandate to monitor the fragile truce agreements.
Patrols drawn from the OSCE’s 57 participating States were subsequently sent to the war zone and other areas of Ukraine, including Kyiv in the center of the country and Lviv to the west. The war, now in its eighth year, was started by Russia and has killed 14,000 people and internally displaced more than a million more.
Today, Ukraine faces levels of violence in Donbas not seen in years and the threat of a further Russian military invasion of the rest of Ukraine. SMM field monitors are currently hamstrung by a chain of command devoted mainly to collecting salaries and woefully ill equipped to conduct ground patrols in a major war, according to former SMM staffer Steven Bowkett.
Culture of Bureaucracy and Control
A former British Army officer with combat experience, Bowkett served as an SMM front line monitor from 2014-2018. He told the Kyiv Post he stands by a damning report he handed the British government when he left the mission.
He provided this newspaper with the following text from his report:
“The SMM is dominated by a self-regarding, bureaucratic, process-dominated culture and by senior managers, notably at Team and [Head Office], who frequently lack the knowledge, skills, experience and strength of character necessary to operate in a conflict environment,” Bowkett wrote.
SMM mid-level managers are “timid, mistrustful, over-controlling, lack the vision to be proactive [and] the courage and personality to provide genuinely inspiring leadership,” he added.
Iryna Korobko, National Media Officer of the OSCE SMM to Ukraine, didn’t respond to phone calls or a text message. Her colleague, Natalia Labenskyj, Deputy Chief of the monitoring mission’s press and public information unit, also didn’t respond to contact attempts.
Also voicing concerns about SMM managers and their ability to handle dangerous and fast-developing situations is Vanda Dahlbom, a Swedish policewoman serving in the SMM as a ground patrol member and later operations officer.
She said the SMM’s risk-averse policy of operating only during the day is crippling the mission’s core purpose of constantly monitoring weapon locations and movements, tracking incidents of violence, and giving voice to civilians affected by the fighting.
“Cease-fire violations and prohibited movement of troops occur when monitors are safely back at base,” Dahlbom said. “Not being present in the field 24/7 is a clear disadvantage to both the SMM’s task…[civilian] people living close to the line of contact are less safe because of it.”
Dahlbom and Bowkett said the SMM’s current “draconian” security rules, with very rare exception, prevent SMM patrols from approaching most locations and troops along the front line. SMM patrols in Ukraine’s east are, they said, for the most part generally uneventful road trips through backcountry Donbas, broken up with intermittent stops to open car doors and listen for distant explosions.
Staff Shortages
The SMM’s boss, Ambassador Yaşar Halit Çevik, in a Feb. 18 speech to the OSCE’s Permanent Council pointed to another weakness: staff shortages.
He said the COVID-19 pandemic has thinned the SMM’s ranks perceptibly but that he “hopes” the situation will improve.
Four field monitors currently employed by the SMM told the Kyiv Post that the situation is in fact much worse. All identified themselves to a Kyiv Post editor and requested their names not be published because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
According to these staffers, recent SMM contingent evacuations by Denmark, the U.S., Britain and Canada have eviscerated the SMM’s ranks. The exodus has removed at least 160 international staff from the SMM, which on average has 600 members.
Two SMM staffers described bureaucratic bloat as having weakened the mission’s ability to put boots on the ground. They said between one quarter and one third of the mission’s international staff are stationed at mission headquarters in Kyiv.
This cohort performs administrative, research, technical, editorial and mid-level managerial tasks, and never participates in ground patrols, they added.
Capacity for robust patrols in Ukraine’s east is further undermined, monitors said, because the SMM maintains multiple patrol bases far from the Donbas such as in Ivano-Frankivsk and Chernivtsi. Estimates of total SMM international staff deployed outside the Donbas range from 100 to 200.
The monitors said that SMM deploys, at best, 20 patrols covering the 420-kilometer front line per day. Of the SMM’s 600-plus international monitoring team members, less than 100 SMM international staff (on average) are ever physically in the Donbas on patrols, they said.
