EU police in Ukraine

Now that the strategic town of Debaltseve has fallen into the hands of pro-Russian separatists, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko is proposing the European Union send a police force to eastern Ukraine. After meeting with his national security council, Poroshenko said the EU police should be given a United Nations mandate to monitor the ceasefire - and possibly even the borders between the separatist-controlled region and Russia.

This proposal has met with great skepticism in Brussels. The EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, let it be known that the immediate priority was implementing the agreements reached in Minsk last week. There, Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France had agreed that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) would continue to monitor the situation in Ukraine and to report its findings. Ukraine, Russia, EU countries and the US are represented in the OSCE. Around 450 unarmed members of the supranational organization have been observing developments in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine since March 2014.

The right acronym for the job

"Our priority is to implement the Minsk agreement. That's already started. We are equipping the OSCE with armored vehicles. We are already providing the OSCE with satellite imagery and whatever else they need," Maciej Popowski, a senior member of the EU diplomatic service, said in Riga. The EU defense ministers are currently meeting in the Latvian capital. The OSCE also receives funding from the EU. Its observers come from 41 states, a large number of them from EU member countries.

The OSCE, which is pledged to neutrality, is being hindered in its work, Secretary General Lamberto Zannier said in Kyiv. Both sides, he said, must do more to allow the OSCE to do its job. The organization's monitoring drones have been attacked and its employees taken hostage. The Minsk agreement calls for the OSCE to watch over a 50- to 100-kilometer buffer zone between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian forces as soon as the ceasefire comes into force and heavy weapons are withdrawn from eastern Ukraine. The border with Russia is to be monitored only if Ukraine has clarified the status of the separatist regions in its constitution.

Popowski said he did not completely rule out a greater role for the EU in monitoring the implementation of the Minsk agreement, and said he was familiar with Poroshenko's proposal. "But we need to know more about it. We need clarity. Each EU commitment requires a clear mandate and must be negotiated with the EU member states."

EU diplomats in Brussels think it is unlikely that a future armed UN peacekeeping force drawn from the EU could keep the warring parties separate and monitor borders. They say a force of this kind would have to consist of trained soldiers, because police officers are not trained for these tasks. A peace mission on the UN model would be unlikely without the assistance of NATO, which possesses the necessary military and logistical structures.

An army of consultants

The EU already has an unarmed police mission in Kyiv. It has been sending police officers, border guards, judges and lawyers to Ukraine since July 2014.

"There are already EU civilian advisers in Ukraine. But this advisory mission focuses on building institutions, namely the interior ministry and the police authorities," Popowski said. This mission, the European Union Advisory Mission for Civilian Security Sector Reform Ukraine, or EUAM, is still being set up and will advise the government in Kyiv for two years. It is not intended to have a role in the Eastern Ukraine conflict. Since 2005, EU police have also been involved in another mission, the EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine (EUBAM). Its 200 employees monitor the border between Ukraine and Moldova, the location of Transnistria, a narrow strip of land that belongs to Moldova under international law, but is ruled by a pro-Russian regime. The EU also has stationed a smaller observer mission stationed in Georgia, where Russia has occupied the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia since 2008.

The EU operates further police missions in Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Palestinian territories, Libya, Congo, Niger and Mali. Added to these are military operations in Somalia, the Central African Republic and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Ukrainian Ambassador to the EU in Brussels, Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, told the German newspaper Die Welt the EU had built up strong peacekeeping experience in places like the Balkans. "Why shouldn't the EU do that in the Donbas?" Yelisieiev asked.

But EU diplomats in Brussels point out that a massive contingent of UN and NATO soldiers were deployed in the Balkan conflict first. The EU's police missions have more to do with civilian reconstruction, they say - and the situation in eastern Ukraine is another matter.

Russian rejection

Germany's special coordinator for Russian policy, Gernot Erler, said a peacekeeping deployment of EU police was unrealistic, "because such a mission must also have the consent of Russia." And Russia regards the EU as taking sides in the Ukraine conflict, Erler said. The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, already declared that Ukraine's request for Blue Helmets had placed the Minsk agreements in question.