The Vienna Document consultations requested by the Ukrainian authorities will not bring any breakthrough security solutions. This was announced to Izvestia on Monday, February 14, by Oleg Shakirov, a senior expert at the Center for Advanced Management Decisions (CPUR), a PIR Center consultant.
He recalled that the last time meetings of this format were held in the spring of 2021, there were two of them, and the Russian Federation attended only one. The mechanism is quite technical, and if countries have any concerns, they can use it, the expert added.
“There is also an informational aspect here: these requests are transmitted via the OSCE communication network – they do not have to be public, and if they are made public, then this is a conscious step that can be interpreted as a tool in a political game,” Shakirov said.
The rhetoric is as follows: Ukraine wants information, Russia does not provide it, and so on, he explained. Given all this, one should not expect that consultations on the Vienna Document will bring any real breakthrough solutions, the expert concluded.
The day before, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that Kiev was asking for a meeting with Russia and all states parties to the Vienna Document within 48 hours to discuss the security situation.
According to him, if Russia “takes seriously its words about the indivisibility of security in the OSCE area,” the country must fulfill its military transparency obligations to reduce tension and enhance security for all participating states.
The Polish OSCE Chairmanship reported in Twitterthat the meeting requested by Kiev will take place on February 15.
On February 11, Kuleba indicated that Ukraine was waiting for a response from Russia within 48 hours, which would contain information about the areas of military activity and the number of military personnel on the border.
On the same day, a source in the Russian Foreign Ministry stressed that Moscow had received a request from Kiev. According to him, the Russian side does not consider it “justified, since the activity is not unusual and does not give grounds for launching the mechanism for reducing military danger under the 2011 Vienna Document on confidence- and security-building measures.”
In the United States and EU countries, they have recently expressed concern about the alleged increase in Russia’s “aggressive actions” against Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly denied such accusations, saying that it does not threaten anyone. As the Russian side emphasized, such accusations are used as a pretext to deploy as much NATO military equipment as possible near the borders of the Russian Federation.
On February 12, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in an interview with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, said that the propaganda campaign launched by the United States and its allies about “Russian aggression” against Ukraine pursues provocative goals, thereby encouraging the authorities in Kiev to sabotage the Minsk agreements and harmful attempts to resolve by force “Problems of Donbass”.
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