The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is working on a new plan to bring peace to the Donbas through implementing the basic provisions of the Minsk peace agreements.
Moscow, however, is having none of it.
Details of the OSCE’s plan were given by its author Martin Sajdik, the organization’s special envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group of Ukraine, Russia, and the OSCE, which is engaged in negotiations on the future of the war-torn Donbas.
The new peace deal envisages the deployment of UN peacekeepers, a provisional international government, and the setting up of a reconstruction agency in the currently Russian-occupied region of Ukraine’s east.
But shortly after details of the Sajdik plan were announced, it was immediately rejected by Russia, with Moscow accusing the OSCE envoy of exceeding his authorities as a peace mediator.
Boris Gryzlov, the special envoy of Russia to the Minsk process, said on Jan. 29 that the proposed plan “raised eyebrows.”
“We would not like to think that the OSCE special representative is admitting its own incompetence and unreadiness to resolve the tasks set for the group (for negotiations in Minsk),” the Russian official said in comments published by the Kremlin-controlled TASS news agency.
Gryzlov said that Russia and OSCE were only mediators in an “internal political conflict in Ukraine,” and that parties of this conflict were “the central authorities of Ukraine and separate districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.”
In fact, Russia is a party to the war in Ukraine, having first invaded and occupied the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in February 2014, and then started a covert military intervention in the country’s eastern Donbas region in early April 2014.
Under the Sajdik plan, the OSCE proposes to deploy a UN peacekeeping mission, including both a military and a police contingent, while the OSCE will continue its current monitoring mission, which has been going on in the region since the beginning of the war in the spring of 2014.
Sajdik said the number of UN peacekeepers that could be deployed to the Donbas had not been yet settled, but also added that he did not believe that UN would need to send as many as 20,000 troops to the region, as suggested by Ukraine, which has called for a UN peacekeeping force in the Donbas since early 2018.
The OSCE and UN would closely cooperate with each other, being both headed by a special representative.
Besides, Sajdik also proposed to create a European Union-led special agency for reconstruction, the activities of which would cover the whole territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, including their Ukrainian-controlled districts.
The agency would also coordinate with with UN and OSCE, but would not be subordinate to them.
The plan also envisages an amnesty for combatants of the Russian-led forces, as provided the Minsk agreements.
Lastly, the plan envisages creating an interim UN administration in the currently Russian-occupied zone that would monitor the peace process and the region’s reintegration with Ukraine.
Sajdik said that his peace deal should be signed by the leaders of all of the Normandy Four nations — Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany — and that it should be ratified by their parliaments.
“This must be a deal with actual weight in the political and legal realms,” Sajdik said.
“The Minsk agreements were approved neither by Ukrainian nor by Russian parliaments. And this is, of course, a problem.”
According Sajdik, the draft plan was initially presented for debate during the latest meeting of OSCE foreign ministers on December 6-7 in Milan, in the presence of Ukrainian, Russian, German, and French representatives.
But Vadym Chernysh, Ukraine’s Minister of the Occupied Territories, reacted with surprise to the plan, adding that Kyiv was not familiar with its details.
“It is very strange that one person, even though he’s working at the OSCE, is making a proposal on behalf of three organizations — the OSCE, UN, and EU, and simultaneously making recommendations on what those organizations must do,” Chernysh said on Jan. 29.
He added that his ministry had not yet received the text of the plan, and that it had learned details of it only from an interview Sajdik gave to Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung published on Jan. 28.
Nonetheless, on Jan. 16 Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told journalists during a press conference in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sieverodonetsk that OSCE representatives were working over a new peace deal involving an OSCE-UN peacekeeping mission with a police and military component and an international administration for the Donbas.
And Chernych’s deputy minister Georgiy Tuka, said he firmly supported Sajdik’s proposals, although the plan described in the media lacked important details.
“For instance, I’m interested in knowing how illegal combat formations will be disarmed, and also when and how foreign troops will be withdrawn from the Donbas, and what is meant under the amnesty process,” Tuka said on Jan. 29.
“There are lots of such questions.”
The Minsk agreements were signed by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, OSCE, and Russian-led forces during the peak of the war in the Donbas in 2014-2015. Formally meant to halt violence in the region, the first of the two documents was signed on Sept. 5, 2014, shortly following Ukraine’s resounding defeat in the battle of Ilovaisk, during which its army and paramilitary forces were encircled and massacred by invaded Russian regular army units.
The first agreement envisaged a total ceasefire, an amnesty for Russian-led forces fighting against Ukraine, the mutual withdrawal of troops and heavy weapons, and the introduction of “a special self-government status” for the Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas, which was to have been followed by local elections in the war-affected regions.
But the Kremlin immediately broke the agreements, with Russian-led forces commencing major offensives to capture Donetsk airport, which was stubbornly defended by Ukrainian troops for 242 days.
A second Minsk Agreement signed on Feb. 12, 2015 envisaged a total ceasefire and a political settlement in the Donbas, but Russian-led forces supported by the Russian regular army again immediately broke that agreement, resumed fighting and captured the strategic railroad hub of Debaltseve.
Since then, a 500-kilometer front line has divided the embattled region, with sporadic clashes between the Ukrainian army and Russian-led forces still claiming lives of both combatants and civilians almost every day, and with no end in sight.
According to the latest figures published by the United Nations, Russia’s war in the Donbas has killed around 13,000 people and injured more 30,000 since the Kremlin launched hostilities in April 2014.
