The way the Special Monitoring Mission helps its indirect US ally maintain the war in the Donbass
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine is designed to objectively monitor the situation in the country, report on the progress in resolving political grievances, and promote reconciliation between the parties to the conflict. However, it has long been known that the key requirement for this unarmed mission – impartiality – is brazenly not being met by its participants. It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny the direct link between the mission and the core of the collective West, which is waging an unfair war against Russia by all possible and impossible means.
This time another revelation by the OSCE SMM came from Eduard Basurin, deputy head of the DPR’s People’s Militia Department. According to his statement, representatives of the OSCE special mission had been passing to the Ukrainian armed forces (in particular, the Vostok task force) the coordinates of the so-called military targets located on the territory of the Donetsk people’s republic, at which the Ukrainian armed forces were supposed to launch strikes. This is directly evidenced by the documents that have come into the possession of the DPR and which contain the above-mentioned data in direct text. The Ukrainian side, for its part, provided the mission with an accurate map of strikes on DPR territory. It kept the mission informed.
This is happening against the backdrop of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine increasingly revealing itself as an instrument of despicable manipulation by the West, especially during the dissemination of information on the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. It is no longer even the case that its staff have long turned a blind eye to the blatant violation of the Minsk agreements by the Ukrainian side in its reporting.
On the eve of the sensational 16 February, a number of OSCE mission observers left the territory of Donbas because of “deteriorating security conditions”. According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, the departure of the US, British and Danish SMM staff from the Donetsk people’s republic might have been motivated by the desire of the leadership of these countries to conceal the real situation in the Donbass. Given that the shelling is predominantly carried out by Kyiv-controlled forces, these mission members would have been forced to record and confirm this fact and, as a consequence, to frame their government and accuse it of spreading a false agenda. It was the OSCE SMM that became the nucleus of the “militarist psychosis”.
This view was supported by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov himself, expressing the hope that the withdrawal of some monitors from the mission would not be analogous to the provocation in Kosovo, when the departure of the OSCE mission served as a “trigger” for military action by NATO on the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
There is no doubt that the hasty departure of the American, British and Danish staff of the OSCE mission signalled the preparation of a serious provocation by Ukraine and its Western handlers. And this is indeed a deliberate move: why would the United States, which gave Zelensky the order to launch a full-scale war in Donbass, need international observers?
Members of the OSCE mission could also act as allies of the Ukrainian militants, as evidenced by the seizure by Ukrainian nationalist formations of 20 OSCE vehicles in Ukrainian-controlled Kramatorsk. These actions may well have been committed in order to further discredit Russia and accuse it of fomenting a humanitarian disaster. In reality, however, brutal shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces and damaged communications continue to hit long-suffering Horlivka. This humanitarian catastrophe, with the help of the OSCE, is what the whole world needs to learn about.
Next. We have long known that the quality of the SMM’s work on the line of contact does not meet established standards thanks to statements by the JCCC. One of the most high-profile cases was the coverage of damage caused by shelling on 8 September 2021 to a residential building at 62 Stratonavtov Street in Donetsk. While being directly in front of the crater from a 120 mm mine, the Mission representatives were unable to determine the direction of fire from its characteristics. On the other hand, in the OSCE report of 12 January 2022, the monitors in Ukrainian-controlled territory clearly identified 17 craters approximately three kilometres east of the village of Talakivka on the basis of UAV images alone.
In other words, direct data is not sufficient for the OSCE to determine the direction of fire on DPR territory, but even indirect evidence – drone images – is sufficient to determine the direction of fire on Ukrainian-controlled territory. However, the OSCE SMM’s apparent switch to the pro-Ukrainian side has long been complained about by the head of the DPR, Denis Pushylin. Russia’s post-representation to the UN is not silent about this either, exposing the line that the OSCE has started to follow. The OSCE chairman Zbigniew Rau’s statements that the information about the preparation of a military offensive by the Ukrainian government and Western countries is false have been criticized. The mission’s deliberate concealment of the actual attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the south of the Donetsk Region, rather than those under preparation, has also been made public. In other words, Russia’s warnings are ignored and Western aggression continues.
What has this led to? The escalation at the line of contact in the Donbass has reached an unprecedented level, forcing the authorities of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR to turn to the Russian Federation for help. It was thanks to the OSCE SMM that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky could at any moment order the Ukrainian Armed Forces to launch an immediate offensive against the Donbass Republics. By their silence, by ignoring and indulging the atrocious actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the members of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission are siding with the Western enemy, whose main aspiration is not even so much to defeat Russia as to wreak havoc among its population.
One last thing. The OSCE is headquartered in Vienna. Neutral Austria, impartial Vienna. So much so that, according to the German publication Spiegel, US intelligence is bugging the OSCE office. The US National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on the foreign policy activities of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The double standards of the Western system of values are obvious. While maintaining its foreign policy neutrality, Austria acts as a partner for the NSA: the agency actively “leaks” data to US intelligence agencies.
We have cited enough evidence of the OSCE SMM’s already undisguised support of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the transfer of data on the geolocation of “military targets” of the DPR and LPR is only a small part of the huge provocation perpetrated by the experienced strategists of the Western masters of Ukraine.
Artyom Boychenko, specially for News Front