TASS FACTBOX. On March 11, 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will hold talks with visiting Secretary General of the Organization ...
TASS FACTBOX. On March 11, 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will hold talks with visiting Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Feridun Sinirlioglu.
This will be Sinirlioglu’s first visit to Russia in this role. The OSCE’s previous secretary general, Helga Schmid, visited Russia in 2021. The sides will discuss a wide range of topics of the organization’s activities and its engagement with Russia.
TASS FACTBOX editors have compiled this overview on relations between Russia and the OSCE.
OSCE
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is the largest regional platform dealing with security issues. The OSCE traces its origins to the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), which convened its first summit in 1975 at the initiative of the former Soviet Union to search for ways of easing tensions between socialist and capitalist countries during the Cold War. The summit yielded the Helsinki Final Act, which laid down the basic principles of international cooperation. The document was signed on August 1, 1975, by 33 European countries, the United States, and Canada. On January 1, 1995, the CSCE was reorganized as the OSCE, with a declared mission of preventing conflicts and settling crises in the region.
Currently, the OSCE has 57 members: all European countries, six Central Asian nations, the United States, and Canada. Russia takes part in OSCE activities as the Soviet Union’s successor. The Russian language is one of the organization’s official languages.
OSCE basic principles
The OSCE’s central decision-making body is the OSCE Ministerial Council, which is composed of the OSCE member countries’ foreign ministers. It meets at least once a year and adopts resolutions by consensus. Although non-binding, these resolutions are seen as political commitments of states.
The organization’s framework includes the Permanent Council, Forum for Security Cooperation (focused on increasing military security and stability in Europe and covering key politico-military agreements of the OSCE), Economic and Environmental Forum, and various committees. The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHIR) and the Parliamentary Assembly (which meets several times a year) have been working within the OSCE since 1991. In 1992, the OSCE established the Office of the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM).
OSCE leadership is rotated between its member countries. The foreign minister of the presiding country acts as the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office. The Secretary General is the chief administrative official. Feridun Sinirlioglu of Turkey has been OSCE Secretary General since December 2024.
OSCE operations in Russia
Over the entire period of its membership in the organization, Russia has sought to prioritize such topics as the implementation of commitments not to enhance one’s security at the expense of others, the inadmissibility of government coups, fighting neo-Nazism and aggressive nationalism, the protection of national minorities’ rights, and calls for adopting common election monitoring rules.
Russia has participated in a number of negotiating and mediatory formats within the OSCE, such as the Minsk Group on the settlement of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, the 5+2 Transnistrian settlement format, and the Contact Group on the situation in eastern Ukraine, which was set up to advance the Minsk accords. Russia continues to facilitate dialogue between Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia as part of the Geneva discussions on security and stability in the South Caucasus (the latest meeting was held on March 4 and 5, 2025).
Until recently, Russia was involved in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, where it was represented by five members of the Federation Council, or upper house of parliament, and ten State Duma (lower house) lawmakers. The Assembly endorsed Russia-initiated resolutions on national minorities, on the inadmissibility of the discrimination of Christians, Muslims, and people of other faiths, on the need for stricter criminal responsibility for terrorists, and on combating the use of the internet to recruit terrorists.
OSCE criticism of Russia
However, OSCE members have regularly criticized Russia in nearly all of its formats. Thus, the Parliamentary Assembly passed resolutions on the non-recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, on the militarization of the Black and Azov Seas. Apart from that, it called on Russia to waive its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s independence and condemned the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream projects, describing them as an instrument of political and economic pressure on countries that depend on energy supplies.
Following the beginning of the special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, pressure on Russia increased. Within the Forum for Security Cooperation, the US, EU, UK, Canadian, and Ukrainian delegations repeatedly accused Russia of violating international documents, including the 1975 Helsinki Final Act.
Russia’s position on the OSCE
In January 2023, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov voiced criticism of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) that was tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Minsk agreements on Ukraine, whose observers were deployed to the frontline in Donbass in 2014-2022. The top Russian diplomat accused the mission of bias, saying that it was backing Ukraine’s interpretation of the developments. Apart from that, there was evidence that OSCE observers provided the Ukrainian military with information about industrial facilities and Russia’s positions in Donbass. These details were used for missile strikes on these sites. On March 2, 2025, Greece’s former Ambassador to Ukraine Vasilios Bornovas confirmed that OSCE observers in Donbass had been sharing such information with the Ukrainian military.
In recent years, Russia has been pointing out that the West was pursuing an aggressive course of using the Forum for Security Cooperation as a Russophobic platform and had been boycotting its work. Russian representatives argued that such tasks as promoting tolerance and inter-cultural dialogue, fighting forms of neo-Nazism, Islamophobia, and Christianophobia, and defending the rights of national minorities and believers had been neglected by the OSCE. All of the OSCE institutions dealing with human rights problems have remained silent about the Kiev regime’s actions aimed at removing the Russian language from all spheres of life in Ukraine. The organization is doing nothing to investigate the explosions at the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022 and the developments in Bucha in March 2022 (the ODIHR has distanced itself from the probe).
Apart from that, Russia has repeatedly criticized the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and called on its leadership and a number of member states to revise their Russophobic and discriminatory approaches to issues of European security. According to Russian lawmakers, instead of creating conditions for a constructive exchange of views and forming a unifying agenda, the Parliamentary Assembly has been used as a politicized instrument of anti-Russian policies.
Suspension of Russia’s participation in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly
In July 2024, Russia suspended its participation in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and ceased payment of its contributions (around 256,000 euro a year, according to Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma international committee). This decision was made in view of continuous attempts to strip the Russian delegation of the right to vote and visa refusals for Russian lawmakers. "Russia cannot tolerate a situation when it is barred from voicing its position within the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and we will not finance this farce," State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said at the time.
Addressing a ministerial meeting in Valletta, Malta, in December 2024, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that "there is not a single area where the OSCE could play any useful role at all." According to the top Russian diplomat, "there is no room for cooperation or security in the OSCE policies."
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