What it means to be asked: Reflections on a mission to Ukraine

On 9 July, I sat in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Permanent Council plenary meeting in the Hofburg in Vienna and, alongside two colleagues, presented a report documenting how the Russian Federation is systematically militarising and indoctrinating Ukrainian children.

I get asked two kinds of questions about this work. One is about the findings themselves. The other, just as often, is: how does someone end up doing this?

The short answer to the latter question is the so-called Moscow Mechanism. Established in 1991, it lets OSCE participating States launch an independent expert investigation into a serious human rights concern. On 14 May this year, 41 of the OSCE's 57 participating States invoked it over the treatment of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation in the occupied territories.

Ukraine, as the state on whose territory the mission would work, then had to appoint the experts, not from a shortlist Ukraine drew up itself, but from a list of some 90 individuals, nominated by their States, who are to serve in their individual capacities as “eminent persons, […] from whom an impartial performance of their functions may be expected”. I have been on that list for some years, nominated by the UK, and when Ukraine announced its selection and the mission was formally established on 1 June, I found myself in very flattering, and slightly intimidating, company: Hervé Ascensio, an international lawyer from Paris, and Elīna Šteinerte, a human rights expert from Latvia who also sits on the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture.

Is this something I have done before? Not quite in this form; this was my first Moscow Mechanism mission. But it did not come from nowhere. Over 25 years I have moved back and forth between the seminar room and rooms where actual conflicts get argued over: advising on power sharing in Kirkuk in Iraq in 2008-9, working on the drafting of Yemen's post-Arab Spring constitution in 2014, engaging for years with the Transnistria settlement process in Moldova since 2003, and a long list of other OSCE-adjacent work on frozen and not-so-frozen conflicts across the post-Soviet space and the Western Balkans.

None of that is particularly glamorous, but most of it is interesting. It often means reading documents, sitting in unremarkable meeting rooms, and trying to work out what is true when several parties have strong incentives to tell you otherwise. That, it turned out, are exactly some of the skills a Moscow Mechanism mission needs.

Which gets at why states and international organisations reach out to academics for this kind of work rather than diplomats or NGO staff. An academic on the OSCE’s expert list has no government instructing them, no domestic constituency to answer to, and, if they have done the job for long enough, a track record that both sides of an argument can check.

This kind of independence, however, doesn’t mean not having an opinion. I grew up in East Germany – so few things surprised me in what we found about Russia’s indoctrination and militarisation of Ukrainian children. At times, I felt like revisiting a technologically much more advanced and much more coercive version of my childhood.

We spent six days in Ukraine, from 6 to 11 June, meeting state institutions and civil society organisations. We met young adults who had escaped from the occupied territories and teachers who worked in schools there, then were forced out by the occupation forces and managed to maintain some contact with the pupils they had to leave behind.

Some of the personal testimonies we collected were quite upsetting – especially considering the bigger picture here: this kind of indoctrination and militarisation has been going on since 2014, and it affects approximately 1.6 million children in the occupied territories. There are now Ukrainian children being born in Crimea whose parents have spent their formative teenage years under Russian occupation.

As we write in our report, Russia’s indoctrination and militarisation efforts have moved, in little more than a decade, from an initially improvised, friction-laden occupation policy in Crimea to a fast, well-resourced, and expanding architecture that reaches ever younger children, involves an ever-wider range of actors and institutions, and extends across ever more borders. This effort is systematic, happens within and beyond the classroom and involves all layers of government in the Russian Federation. It increasingly integrates non-governmental actors like the Russian Orthodox Church and state-owned corporations – using a variety of coercive tools to build a conscription pipeline for the Russian armed forces that sends Ukrainian boys at age 18 to the frontlines of Russia’s war of aggression against their own country.

This puts into perspective some of the ‘first-world problems’ that I grappled with during the trip to Ukraine: spending three nights in an air raid shelter in Kyiv, having to break my Wordle streak because security protocol meant limited access to personal mobile phones, and being rushed out of a meeting and into an airless cellar by our security team during a daytime alarm. A lot of this has become completely normalised by ordinary Ukrainians after almost five years of war – a degree of resilience that is as impressive as it is humbling.

After returning from Kyiv, we wrote the report, almost 80,000 words, 44 recommendations, 637 footnotes, in the space of about a fortnight, cross-referencing testimony, tons of open-source material, and a vast number of official reports from the UN, the OSCE, and the EU.

When it was all done, we were both exhausted and proud. The fact that Ukraine’s official response identified six priority actions that its government will take as a direct result of our work also makes us hopeful that we made at least a small difference.

The whole experience reinforced for me that the distance between what I teach in an international security seminar and what gets argued over in Vienna, or documented in a war crimes ledger in Kyiv, is smaller than it looks. The scholarship that prepares my students to write a good essay on the politics of international humanitarian law is, with enough years and enough willingness to go and check things in person, the same scholarship that lets me say, with confidence, that a state cannot simply wave away the fact that a war crime is a war crime.