Burkhalter warns of dangers of Crimea vote

"Together with Russia" - a Crimea referendum poster Keystone

Sunday’s planned referendum in the Crimea is “illegal” and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) will not be sending observers, Swiss President Didier Burkhalter said in a statement issued by the OSCE on Tuesday.

Burkhalter is this year’s chairman of the OSCE. He is also Switzerland’s foreign minister.

On Tuesday the regional parliament in the Crimea declared the peninsula to be independent of Ukraine. The referendum will ask voters to approve a request for Crimea to be admitted to the Russian Federation.

“For any referendum regarding the degree of autonomy or sovereignty of the Crimea to be legitimate, it would need to be based on the Ukrainian constitution and would have to be in line with international law,” Burkhalter said in the statement.

OSCE observers would only go if they were invited by the “participating state”, he added, referring to the Ukraine.

Burkhalter pointed out that experience had shown that modifications to constitutional set ups were “complex and time consuming”, and expressed concern that if all stakeholders were not “on board”, the process “would provoke tensions instead of leading to sustainable solutions”.

He repeated his readiness to hold discussions with all sides, “possibly in the form of a Contact Group”, to find ways out of the current situation, and called for the deployment of an OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine as soon as possible.