Your trusted source

At the meeting of the Standing Committee of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, taking place on Saturday in Baku, the Azerbaijani delegation opposed the discussion of the report of the Finnish co-rapporteur for OSCE PA's Committee on Political Affairs and Security Pia Kauma entitled “Democratic Control of Armed Forces and the Vienna Document”.

The head of the Azerbaijani delegation to the OSCE PA Bahar Muradova spoke against the document. She noted that the OSCE PA must demonstrate a specific position on the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

The above mentioned report did say that the regional conflicts pose additional challenges for the OSCE. The report does not include also the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, as well as conflicts in Georgia and Moldova. The crisis in Ukraine and the unilateral annexation of Crimea by Russia “has challenged the whole international order and the sovereignty of independent state,” the report reads.

As APA reports in its turn, since the end of the Cold War, new threats have emerged with new operational tactics and weapon systems.

The document notes that terrorism, cyber warfare, unmanned aerial vehicles and the way they can be used to conduct more limited operations are more relevant to modern security policy, and demand new responses. The report says that as threats have changed, the quantitative assessments of troop and material counts do not carry the same weight they used to. In an age when one can theoretically cripple an entire nation with a successful cyber attack, simple counts of a country’s main battle tanks or other equipment are of little value.

The document notes that new regional conflicts also pose additional challenges for the OSCE.