EU: As José Manuel Barroso prepares to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Thursday, relations between the EU and its largest neighbour are becoming ever more fractious. The latest dispute centres on the Vienna-based Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the world's largest regional security organisation with 55 participating states, including Russia, the former Soviet republics, the EU's member states and the US.
External affairs commissioner Benita Ferrero Waldner last weekend accused Russia of precipitating a crisis in the OSCE by blocking its budget and undermining the organisation's election monitoring activities.
"Indeed, we are having a bit of a crisis there. This is true. And therefore I think the OSCE is at a very important and challenging point in its history," she said.
The immediate crisis concerns the OSCE's budget for 2005, which Russia has blocked, leaving the organisation unable to undertake new projects or hire new staff. Slovenia, which holds the OSCE's chairmanship this year, will today propose that a budget should be agreed by the end of this month.
The EU contributes 70 per cent of the OSCE's budget, with the US providing 12 per cent and other western countries, such as Canada and Switzerland, accounting for a further 10 per cent. Ireland's contribution last year was about €1.3 million, although the Government also made voluntary contributions to individual projects.
Russia is expected to accept the Slovenian budget compromise but EU diplomats say that the dispute at the OSCE goes deeper than a row over money. They say that Moscow, angry at the OSCE's activities in the former Soviet republics, is bent on undermining the organisation's effectiveness.
"They want to reduce the impact of the OSCE, particularly in the area of election monitoring," one diplomat said.
OSCE election monitors are among the most experienced and authoritative in the world and their analysis is accepted without question by most democratic states. Election monitoring is conducted by the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) which operates free of political interference from the OSCE's participating states.
When ODIHR declared that Ukraine's presidential election last year was neither free nor fair, it triggered the events that led to the "Orange Revolution". ODIHR election assessments influence EU decisions on relationships with its neighbours, particularly in the Balkans.
Russia has long been unhappy with ODIHR's activities and has called for its election monitoring to be brought under the political control of the OSCE. Moscow has proposed that no election monitoring reports should be published until the OSCE's permanent council has considered them - at least four weeks after the vote.
In recent years, Russia has sent its own election monitors to neighbouring states, invariably concluding that elections were free, fair and transparent, even if ODIHR found the opposite to be the case.
Russia and its allies claim that the OSCE focuses unfairly on their shortcomings and Belarus will this week propose a motion of censure on Britain for giving only five weeks' notice of next month's general election.
Moscow is also seeking to rein in other OSCE activities in the former Soviet republics, including human rights campaigns and projects to promote a free press.