Russia is planning to use the CIS observation mission which will monitor the election to the State Duma to legalise the occupation of Crimea, Ihor Solovey, head of the World section at LB.ua, has said in his article entitled "Crimean trap. Russia is trying to legalise the occupation of Crimea with the help of the CIS".
The article says that by recognising voting results on the territory of Crimea, the CIS member states will de sure recognise the illegal occupation of the peninsula by Russia.
"In the future, the decision of international observation missions will be used by Russian propaganda in the same fashion it uses the so-called 16 March 2014 'referendum': when results are given wide promotion while the details of the process (at the gunsight of a foreign army) are hushed up," he says.
According to Solovey, the Kremlin is aware that it cannot persuade Western observers to legalise the occupation of Crimea in the same way.
"Probably that is why the work of the OSCE ODIHR observation mission in Crimea is yet in question," he suggests.
Currently, the CIS member states found themselves in a difficult situation because "none of Moscow's even most loyal allies has not recognised the annexation of the peninsula yet". To say that the CIS member states recognise Crimea as a Russian territory, Moscow is using certain tricks. In particular, the details of organisation of the CIS observation mission at the election to the State Duma and the process of approving a candidate for mission chairman, are kept secret. First of all, to prevent Ukraine from blocking this issue.
The author points out that Russia has sent its invitations to the CIS member states to observe the parliamentary election not through a standard procedure: not through the central office of the CIS Executive Committee in Minsk (which includes Ukraine's representative) but through the economic office of the Executive Committee located in Moscow.
Also, the invitations were sent directly to the foreign ministries of the member states from Moscow, bypassing the CIS Executive Committee in Minsk. Since Ukraine officially quit the CIS election monitoring mission in 2015, it did not receive the invitation. It is noted that the Minsk-based Executive Committee learned about the dispatch of the invitations and a possible start of the monitoring mission from mass media.
It is currently unclear who will head the CIS mission and this issue is not on the agenda of the next meeting scheduled for 30 August, which is done for the purpose of preventing Ukraine from blocking this process, the article reads.