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De-escalating the conflict: What the OSCE, the UN, and Europe are (not) doing to prevent war

By Lorenzo Maria Pacini | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 4, 2026

Three signs of the same crisis

I want to ask all our readers – and you, the one reading this – a question: Do you want war?

Regardless of political, military, national, or ideological preferences, this is a serious question. Who really wants war?

We must all ask ourselves this question – and even more so, it should be asked by the politicians, technocrats, and power brokers in European chancelleries who continue to foment war.

We won’t discuss moral issues right now – we’ll write about those on another occasion. Let’s start with the institutional facts and try to understand whether and how anyone has attempted to bring about de-escalation – or not. Because when we read the Western press, there’s a constant impression that European leaders are the world’s best diplomats, constantly striving to solve global problems and ensure peace. Yet, there is a lack of sources, data, and concrete evidence. And where are all those institutions that were supposedly created to ensure peace for the entire world?

On September 30, 2026, Moscow delivered a non-paper to NATO declaring its readiness to deploy its entire arsenal, including nuclear weapons, should the Alliance attempt to isolate the Kaliningrad region. The document explicitly mentions the possibility of striking the decision-making centers of member countries from the very early stages of a conflict, and a senior European defense official noted that a threat phrased in these terms had not been heard since the end of the Cold War. Two weeks later, in Warsaw, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe responded that a Russian attack would be entirely futile. That same month, Russian border guards detained a German merchant ship in the Gulf of Finland for several hours.

Taken together, these incidents reflect the current dynamic: verbal deterrence on both sides, low-intensity incidents, and the absence of any mechanism capable of defusing them before they escalate into a crisis. This article argues that de-escalation between Europe and Russia does not depend primarily on the goodwill of governments. It depends on rebuilding a risk-containment architecture that Europe has allowed to erode over the course of twenty years. That architecture does not need to be invented from scratch: it already exists, in a dormant form, within the mechanisms of the OSCE and the United Nations system. These are the only multilateral forums in which Europe and Russia still sit together as full members, and for this very reason, they are the only ones capable of producing agreements that both sides can consider their own.

Each side interprets the other’s rearmament as offensive preparation. In Moscow, it is claimed that NATO and the European Union are preparing for a confrontation around 2030; in various Western military circles, the 2028–2030 window is specifically identified as the period during which a Russian attack would become possible. These are mirror-image predictions, and mirror-image predictions tend to become self-fulfilling, because every defensive measure confirms the adversary’s suspicion. It’s the security dilemma – elementary, Watson.

Compared to the Cold War, however, one decisive element is missing. Back then, the rivalry was framed by treaties, hotlines, notifications of military exercises, and mutual inspections. That framework has largely disappeared today. The INF Treaty expired in 2019, the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe has been abandoned, the Open Skies regime has been gutted, and New START is set to expire in February 2026 without a successor. Two armed powers face off along a line stretching from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea, and they do so without a safety net.

Added to this is a more strictly political problem. Europe is the object of the conflict but not a party to the negotiations. Talks on Ukraine are mediated by Washington: on October 11, the U.S. president announced an energy truce that neither Moscow nor Kiev has confirmed; at the end of the month, a local ceasefire went into effect in Oleški, and a new round of negotiations is expected in mid-November. Europe appears in this context as a financier and potential guarantor, but remains far from the table where the terms are being defined. Yet whatever agreement emerges from that table will reshape the continent’s security order. The paradox is clear: Europeans have institutions built precisely for this purpose, yet they have stopped using them.

The absurdity of a conventional war – repetition helps

Before discussing the tools, it is worth stating frankly what rarely appears in official statements: for Europe, a conventional war against Russia would be a strategic absurdity, and Europe is not willing to fight it. We have already written this many times, it is true, but as the ancients used to say, “repetita iuvant” – repetition helps. This statement holds true in three respects.

The first is material. Four and a half years of war in Ukraine have shown that high-intensity conflict in our century is a war of attrition: victory is achieved by producing ammunition, drones, and equipment faster than the adversary can destroy them, and by replacing troops faster than they are lost. Russia has restructured its economy for this purpose. At the 2025 Hague Summit, European allies decided to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035: a ten-year timeframe that amounts to an implicit admission that such capacity does not exist today. Industries remain fragmented into dozens of incompatible weapons systems, stockpiles have been depleted to support Kiev, and the capabilities that make a modern campaign possible – from satellite intelligence to in-flight refueling – depend largely on the United States.

The second aspect is social and political. European societies are neither prepared nor willing to endure losses in the tens of thousands of men. Debates over the reinstatement of conscription in Germany and other countries show just how open and divisive the issue remains. No European government could ask its citizens to make a sacrifice on that scale for any purpose other than the immediate defense of its national territory.

The third implication is the most serious. A conventional war with a nuclear power does not remain conventional for long. The September non-paper states this in no uncertain terms: in a conflict of this kind, there would be no distant front line and no safe rear, because European capitals would be the front line. Preparing to defend oneself is legitimate and necessary. Believing that one can win such a war – or even simply fight it without losing what one intends to defend – is a miscalculation. For this reason, de-escalation is not just one moral choice among many: it is the only rational policy available to Europe. It remains to be determined what tools to use to achieve it.

The institutions Europe seems to have forgotten

The OSCE is the successor to the 1975 Helsinki Conference, the only forum in which, at the height of the bipolar confrontation, rival blocs managed to codify common principles: the inviolability of borders, the non-use of force, economic cooperation, and human rights. The 1990 Charter of Paris and the Charter on European Security adopted in Istanbul in 1999 added the principle of the indivisibility of security, according to which no state may strengthen its own security at the expense of others’. It is a principle that both Moscow and Western capitals invoke today, interpreting it in opposite ways. Precisely for this reason, it serves as a starting point: the parties do not debate whether security is indivisible, but rather what this entails in practice.

Behind these principles lies a technical framework that few outside of experts are familiar with. The Vienna Document governs the prior notification of military activities, the annual exchange of information on military forces, and assessment visits. The Forum for Security Cooperation is the venue where participating States discuss conventional arms control. The Conflict Prevention Center manages the communications network linking the capitals and can activate urgent consultation mechanisms in the event of unusual military activities. In 2016, the OSCE also launched a Structured Dialogue on threat perceptions, doctrines, and force deployments: an exercise that was discontinued but which nevertheless constitutes the closest precedent to what Europe needs today. Finally, it should be noted that the Organization has declared itself a regional arrangement under Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter: its initiatives can therefore operate within a framework of universal legitimacy.

The most significant operational experience is the Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, active from 2014 to 2022 with several hundred unarmed civilian observers. Its limitations were real: restricted access, no coercive power, and reports contested by both sides. Yet for eight years, it was the only impartial, daily source of information on ceasefire violations in the Donbas, and its end – when Russia refused to consent to the renewal of its mandate – coincided with the transition to the full-fledged SMO. The Organization emerged weakened, with budgets approved only with great difficulty and presidencies hampered by cross-vetoes, but it is not dead. Russia neither withdrew nor was expelled, and the Swiss presidency for 2026 has openly stated its intention to prepare the OSCE to monitor a potential ceasefire: monitoring the contact line, verifying violations, and even providing electoral assistance. Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis has acknowledged that the Organization can deploy only a few dozen people on short notice, while the front line stretches for about 1,300 kilometers. What is needed, therefore, is a significant political and financial commitment from the participating states. That commitment is exactly what Europe could and should offer.

Alongside the OSCE is the United Nations system, which Europeans tend to view as paralyzed by the Russian veto. This is an incomplete assessment. The Security Council adopted Resolution 2202 in 2015 in support of the Minsk Agreements and, in February 2025, Resolution 2774 calling for a swift end to the conflict – with Russia voting in favor. In July 2022, the Black Sea Grain Initiative, negotiated by the United Nations together with Turkey, demonstrated that even in the midst of fighting, a functional and limited agreement can hold for an entire year if it is managed by a joint coordination center with verifiable rules. Since September 2022, experts from the IAEA, a UN agency, have maintained a permanent presence at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the only stable international presence on a front line. Geneva, the European headquarters of the United Nations, already hosted trilateral talks between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine in 2026.

From this perspective, the veto power takes on a new meaning. An observation mission authorized by the Security Council would require Russian consent, and for this very reason, Moscow could not view it as a hostile measure. The same applies to the consensus rule within the OSCE. What appears to be a limitation is in fact the condition of legitimacy: a safeguard mechanism that the other party helped establish is one that the other party has an interest in not sabotaging. This is the essential difference between a reassurance force composed of European national contingents – which Moscow has already declared unacceptable – and a multilateral presence with a UN mandate and an OSCE operational structure.

Four levels of de-escalation

On this basis, four levels of intervention can be distinguished, ordered from the most urgent to the most ambitious. For each, European multilateral forums already offer a starting point.

The first is incident management. The Baltic Sea is currently the theater most vulnerable to unintended escalation: heavy traffic, the Kaliningrad enclave, the so-called “shadow fleet,” undersea cables, and nearly daily aerial intercepts. In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Agreement on Incidents at Sea at the height of the bipolar rivalry. It worked because it did not require trust, but only predictability, with rules on distances, maneuvers, and communications. A Baltic agreement modeled on that agreement, along with a direct line of communication between regional military commands and an identification system for military flights, would cost little and reduce tensions significantly. In February, Washington and Moscow agreed to reestablish military dialogue. Europeans, who live along the front lines, have even stronger reasons to demand their own channel, and the communications network of the Center for Conflict Prevention could provide the infrastructure without having to create anything new.

The second level concerns the transparency and clarity of red lines. The non-paper on Kaliningrad, regardless of its tone, makes clear where Moscow draws its line. Responding with equal clarity is not a concession. Thomas Schelling demonstrated this precisely: clear commitments stabilize, while ambiguity regarding limited actions destabilizes, because it invites testing the limits. Europe can explicitly state that it does not intend to isolate the enclave, reaffirm the transit guarantees already tested during the 2022 Lithuanian crisis, and revive – even on a voluntary and reciprocal basis – the notifications of major exercises provided for in the Vienna Document. The Forum for Security Cooperation is the natural venue for doing so.

The third level is arms control, where the vacuum is most dangerous. The end of the INF Treaty has reopened the issue of ground-based intermediate-range missiles: on the one hand, the announced deployment of U.S. long-range systems in Germany; on the other, Russian delivery systems in Belarus. These are weapons with flight times of just a few minutes, which compress the time available for political decision-making to the point of virtually eliminating it. A mutual and verifiable moratorium on their deployment on the continent would be the step offering the best cost-benefit ratio. Moscow had put forward such a proposal in 2019, but it was rejected due to the lack of verification guarantees. The challenge, then, is to establish a verification mechanism, and the resumption of the Structured Dialogue within the OSCE would allow this to be done in a format where Europeans are participants – not mere spectators – in Russian-American negotiations.

The fourth level is the political framework, and the crux of the matter remains Ukraine. There can be no de-escalation between Europe and Russia without a ceasefire in Ukraine, nor a stable ceasefire without a guarantee mechanism that Moscow does not interpret as a NATO advance. Three recommendations follow from this. Europe must secure a seat at the table, through a contact group or a small-group format with a clear mandate. It must prepare a package for the gradual easing of sanctions linked to verifiable steps, because sanctions are also a bargaining chip, and a chip that is never spent eventually loses its value. Above all, it must propose, as a guarantee mechanism, an OSCE-led monitoring mission authorized by the United Nations Security Council and substantially funded by European states. This would be the most concrete way to translate the financial burden that Europe already bears into political influence.

Fears, hopes, risks

A deliberate attack by Russia against an Alliance country – or vice versa – remains unlikely in the short term. More likely is the possibility that an incident in the Baltic – a drone straying off course, a ship-to-ship collision, a severed cable – could escalate into a crisis due to a lack of mechanisms capable of containing it. That is where the greatest risk lies, and that is where diplomacy can act immediately: an agreement on incident response, a direct hotline, declared red lines, and mutual notifications. The rest – the missile moratorium, a seat at the table, a guarantee mission under the auspices of the UN and the OSCE – requires time and political courage.

In 2025, the Helsinki Final Act marked its fiftieth anniversary, in a climate that made the occasion almost embarrassing. Yet that document was signed by adversaries who did not trust one another, and it was precisely for this reason that they established rules.

Europe – probably, perhaps, maybe, who knows – does not need to invent a new security order; it needs to go back to using the one it already has, and to do so before an incident renders that choice unnecessary.

November 4, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism | European Union, INF treaty, Russia | Comments Off on De-escalating the conflict: What the OSCE, the UN, and Europe are (not) doing to prevent war