Valletta — Malta closed its year at the helm of the OSCE with a Ministerial Council on 5 and 6 December, passing the chairmanship to Finland at the end of twelve months in which keeping the organisation functioning was itself the achievement.
Foreign Minister Ian Borg had taken the job in January under no illusions. Malta — the organisation’s smallest participating state — accepted the chair after Russia vetoed Estonia, and spent the year managing an institution whose members include both sides of Europe’s largest war since 1945: budgets agreed in fragments, appointments contested, the Ukraine field missions still closed.
The venue carried its own echo: it was a Malta summit in 1989 that many mark as the Cold War’s end. Borg invoked the parallel sparingly, urging members to recover the habit of dialogue even with adversaries — a theme that divided the hall, with Ukraine and its closest allies resisting anything that looked like normalisation with Moscow.
Among the year’s practical outcomes, Malta steered the appointment of the organisation’s senior officials for the 2024–2027 period after the Skopje extensions expired — a process requiring the consensus of all 57 states, including Russia, that more than once looked likely to fail and leave the institution formally leaderless.
The chairmanship also kept the OSCE’s programme presence in Ukraine alive — mine action, support to civilians, documentation of war damage — framing that work as proof the organisation is more than a talking shop, even while conceding that talking is mostly what it can do while the war continues.
Finland’s Elina Valtonen takes over on 1 January with an agenda already written by history: 2025 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act, and Helsinki intends to spend the year asking what that legacy means when one signatory is invading another. Malta’s parting gift is an organisation that has survived to ask the question.
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