Łódź — The OSCE’s twenty-ninth Ministerial Council ended in Łódź on 2 December with Sergey Lavrov addressing a half-emptied hall, no consensus on a declaration, and one unmistakable signal of how the organisation’s map is being redrawn: Estonia’s candidacy to chair in 2024 was blocked by Russia.
Poland, this year’s chair, declined to accredit the Russian foreign minister’s delegation on standard terms, but Lavrov addressed the meeting by video — and much of the hall walked out. Ministers who stayed listened as he accused the West of destroying the organisation; when Western ministers spoke, Russia’s remaining diplomats returned the compliment.
The blocking of Estonia — whose foreign minister, Urmas Reinsalu, responded that his country would not beg for Russia’s permission to serve — leaves the 2024 chairmanship unresolved with little more than a year to spare. Under the OSCE’s consensus rule, any one of the 57 states can veto any decision, and Moscow has spent the year using that power on everything from budgets to mandates to, now, the succession of the chair itself.
Chairman-in-Office Zbigniew Rau closed the meeting by noting what did survive: the organisation’s programmes in Ukraine, its human rights mechanisms, its budget for another year — agreed in fragments, under the threat of the monthly ‘twelfths’ procedure that keeps spending at the previous year’s level when consensus fails.
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, whose government has called for Russia’s expulsion from the organisation altogether, told ministers the OSCE faces an existential choice. The counter-argument, made quietly in Łódź’s corridors, is that expulsion requires consensus too — including Russia’s — and that the organisation’s usefulness after the war may depend on having kept the channel open.
No declaration was adopted; none was expected. The ministers will reconvene next year in Skopje, where North Macedonia — one of the smallest states in the room — takes the chair of an organisation whose largest member is waging a war of aggression against another, and whose rulebook gives the aggressor a vote on everything.
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