Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has faced a deep crisis. Russia and Belarus have blatantly violated key norms of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, severely undermining the OSCE’s role in crisis management, arms control, and confidence building measures (CSBMs). The relevance of these instruments is now tied to ending the war in Ukraine. While the OSCE cannot impose solutions, it remains a potentially vital platform for dialogue.
This policy brief has two parts. The first argues that breaking the impasse requires decisive political leadership and multi-level diplomacy. Lessons from the Cold War’s Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) show that informal initiatives, particularly by neutral states, can help overcome deadlock. Leveraging the OSCE can expand the scope of future negotiations and address the war’s underlying issues.
The second part examines lessons from the war for CSBMs and arms control, emphasising new challenges posed by unarmed aerial systems (UAS) and long-range precision strikes. Growing military activities in Europe highlight the need for military-to-military contacts for managing escalation risks. The OSCE can facilitate such dialogue, support future ceasefire monitoring, and reassess notification and observation requirements for military exercises.
This policy brief has five core recommendations:
US allies in Europe should use the OSCE as a platform to ensure that any diplomatic process toward ending the war in Ukraine evolves in a coordinated way, considers their interests and embeds bilateral efforts of the United States and Russia in a larger pan European framework;
The OSCE Troika should develop and coordinate a unified and comprehensive agenda for advancing dialogue on CSBMs and arms control instruments in 2025 and 2026, including the organisation of a series of security dialogues in the Forum for Security Co-operation (FSC);
OSCE participating States should begin strengthening their capacity for future ceasefire monitoring tasks, establishing robust oversight mechanisms and incorporating effective force protection measures;
OSCE participating States should recognise that under conditions of confrontation, military transparency primarily serves purposes of confidence-building about peaceful intentions and military capacities. Such a mindset needs to drive initiatives for adapting existing and developing new CSBMs;
OSCE participating States should start laying the groundwork for future arms control measures by defining their own strategic interests and relevant force categories in order to develop policy options that align with national interests.
Read the policy brief here
The Expert Network on the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is a new initiative launched by the OSCE to inject new ideas and insights into the organisation’s policy ecosystem. The ELN is one of the Core Partners, and over the last year has conducted research on the OSCE’s toolkit and how it could be used under different future scenarios for European security. More information is available here.
The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated in this policy brief represent the views of the author rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.
Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo / Xinhua