“Everyone asks me, everyone wants me.” Like the Barber of Seville’s Figaro, Sergei Lavrov makes it clear that many want to meet him at the OSCE summit that begins tomorrow in North Macedonia. “I can confirm that we have many requests for bilateral meetings,” said his spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
The Russian foreign minister arrives in Skopje today for a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that risks revealing a serious rift between European countries. Lavrov’s participation, the first in an international meeting in Europe since the start of the war in Ukraine, actually prompted Kiev and the three Baltic countries to announce that their foreign ministers would boycott the meeting.
“The Ukrainian delegation will not take part in the OSCE Ministerial Summit,” said Oleg Nikolenko, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Kiev, accusing Russia of wanting to “exploit the occasion for propaganda purposes and undermine the unity of the West.” Russia has taken an “obstructive stance” within the OSCE and “tried to block its activities and prevent any surveillance activities in Ukraine,” said a statement from the diplomatic heads of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. According to Margus Tsahkna, the Estonian Foreign Minister, Lavrov’s presence “risks legitimizing the Russian aggressor as a rightful member of our community of free nations and trivializing the cruel crimes that Russia is committing in Ukraine.” Tsahkna also called on other OSCE member countries called on “not to accept Moscow’s blackmail” and recalled that three Ukrainian OSCE representatives have been imprisoned in Russian prisons for over 500 days.
Lavrov’s participation in the summit in North Macedonia is in fact the result of a very clever maneuver to circumvent Russian diplomacy, which exploited the consensus rule in force in the OSCE to paralyze its internal functioning. Moscow initially vetoed Estonia’s presidential candidacy in 2024, causing it to fail. It then approved Malta’s candidacy but refused to vote on it at ambassadorial level, insisting that ministers should decide on it. This made Lavrov’s presence inevitable. Unlike Poland, which vetoed the participation of the representative from Moscow during its presidency last year, the authorities in Skopje gave their consent. But to arrive in the North Macedonian capital, Lavrov also had to obtain permission from Bulgaria to fly over its airspace, making an exception to the European ban.
American Secretary of State Antony Blinken will also attend the summit in Skopje, but will not meet the Russian minister. According to a State Department spokesman, Blinken’s presence is intended to express solidarity with his North Macedonian guests and with the OSCE, which is defined as “an important organization dealing with human rights and political legal issues in Europe.”
The OSCE, founded in 1994, is the subsidiary of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, founded in Helsinki in 1975, which represented the highest point of dialogue between East and West during the Cold War. Despite Russian obstruction, the OSCE is active in twelve missions in Central Asia, the Western Balkans, Ukraine and Moldova, where it monitors respect for human rights, the fight against corruption and the fight against human and drug trafficking.