Kyiv — The OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, the unarmed observation force that has been the international community’s eyes on the war in the east for eight years, began evacuating its international staff this week as Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the country.
The mission’s last daily report before the escalation, covering 22 February, recorded 1,420 explosions across the conflict zone in a single day — a figure that would have been extraordinary in any of the past eight years, and that now reads as the overture to something far larger. In 2021 as a whole, the mission counted 36,686 explosions. This week they stopped counting: with roads, airspace and communications collapsing, systematic monitoring became impossible.
At its peak the SMM deployed some 700 monitors from more than 50 OSCE participating states, patrolling both sides of the line of contact in marked white armoured vehicles, operating cameras and drones, and publishing daily reports that — whatever their diplomatic constraints — provided the only independent record of who was shooting at whom in the Donbas.
Its observers could not prevent the war. They were never meant to. Their mandate was to report, impartially, and their reporting made it harder for either side to disguise escalation. As of this week, that record has gone silent precisely when the world needs it most, and the mission’s remaining local staff — Ukrainians, many of them now in cities under bombardment — face an uncertain future.
OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid condemned the invasion and said the organisation is working to keep its people safe. The mission itself has not been formally closed: its mandate, renewed by consensus of all 57 states including Russia, runs to 31 March. What happens after that date, with the OSCE’s own consensus now split by an invasion one member launched against another, is a question Vienna has not yet had to answer in its history.
For the monitors who spent years counting explosions in the east, the arithmetic this week needs no report. The war they documented has become the war they can no longer watch.
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