Politico reports:

The signs had been there for weeks, if not months: Russian forces were massing around Ukraine, painting Zs and Vs on their military vehicles; Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric was getting more and more bellicose; and Western intelligence agencies were warning that an invasion was imminent. But the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest security body, was caught napping.

For eight years, it had overseen a Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) on the ground in Ukraine, whose task it was to observe the war and tally cease-fire violations in the country’s eastern regions and its impact beyond. But when Russian missiles came raining down and tanks began streaming across the Ukrainian border on Feb. 24, it had no plan in place to react to an assault on the scale that Russia had launched.

OSCE officials inside its Vienna headquarters scrambled to figure out what to do with its 966 international monitors and local staff members spread across Ukraine’s 24 regions and the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk under the control of Russia and its separatist proxies.

OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid gave an order in Vienna on the evening of Feb. 24 to evacuate international staff from Ukraine and instructed her chief monitor there to “facilitate the relocation of national mission members within the country where possible and if requested,” according to a statement delivered by Schmid to a special meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on Feb. 27.

But for the hundreds of Ukrainian OSCE staffers, relocation wasn’t an option — and even communication was in short supply.

As Russia began pummeling locations across the country with missile strikes, hundreds of monitors and local staffers were desperately seeking answers from senior OSCE officials. What they received — instead of support or an evacuation plan — was an email expressing sympathy. “Stay safe and the best,” it read. [Continue reading…]