Viktor Kogan-Yasny’s blog post, 12.02.2024

Photo: Viktor Kogan-Yasny / Photo by the Yabloko Press Service

My job is to occasionally write about things that relate to limiting bloodshed now and eliminating it strategically in the future. I have to write in a dry language because it’s “work”. Political leaders, military leaders and military commanders say in dry language how many they have killed and how many more they should kill, and they do not know other ways to achieve their goals.

But I am writing about the opposite, sorry. That is what it is about.

On both sides, the Russian and the Ukrainian-Western, the OSCE is being virtually destroyed. Tactically, almost no one needs it now. There is a strong impulse for a long time, at the level of ideology, formal strategic dogma, to fragment Europe, to fundamentally, not just tactically, build the security of the West without Russia and against Russia, and the security of Russia – without the West and against the West, to do all this according to the patterns of the model that was taking shape under Stalin in 1949 – 1953, and do it now, in the 21st century: to cultivate a kind of military-political “blood feud” along the “Russia-West” line. This is extremely dangerous. Nothing will come out of this other than unwinding the spirals of populism and authoritarianism. There will be no security; on the contrary, fragmentation will, over time, begin producing poorly predictable domino effects.

A long-term strategic approach should be exactly the opposite: strengthening the OSCE, forming – no matter how naive it sounds now – a philosophy of a single space of peace and security from Vancouver to Vladivostok, with the inclusion of Japan, China and Korea, which are now fully connected to Western Europe by a system of land communications.

The OSCE is the most important civilisational achievement of the last quarter of the 20th century. Respecting it, showing an understanding of its meaning became a sign that not all politics had yet dissolved in populist infantilism, that something adult and responsible remained in it.

VIKTOR KOGAN-YASNY

is an Advisor to the Chairman of the Federal Political Committee of the Yabloko party. Head of the public organisation “Regional Civil Initiative – the Right to Life and Civil Dignity”. Candidate of chemical sciences.