The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) The OSCE is going to visit the Crimea in March. The purpose of the monitoring mission is to elect the president of Russia. However, according to the organization, the final decision to visit this particular Russian region has not yet been made. "Representatives can visit the peninsula. True, only if the needs assessment mission sees this as a necessity. The mission will prepare its recommendations and then develop a plan for the deployment of observers in Russia, "the words of the representative of the OSCE / ODIHR" Izvestiya ". As the newspaper was told in the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation, European colleagues are still cautious in assessing a possible visit to the Russian peninsula.

However, even if representatives of the bureau come to Russia, it is clearly not to objectively assess the free will of the Crimeans. "The West is looking for any argument of illegitimacy of Russian elections. And most likely, as a result, the ODIHR will take an undesirable decision in the Crimea, because the process of recognizing the Crimea as a Russian territory in Europe has not yet begun. In any scenario, the ODIHR does not decide the fate of the elections, and their visit to the legitimacy of the elections will not be affected, "the source of Izvestia in the Central Election Commission. In this regard, it should be noted that at the last parliamentary elections in Russia in 2016, the OSCE / ODIHR did not have a. Then the absence of the monitoring mission of the bureau on the peninsula its head Jan Petersen categorically explained by the fact that it is "not the territory of Russia and there is nothing to do there mission". In addition, in the final version of the report, European observers made the calculation of the results of voting in the Russian Federation without taking into account the Crimean figures. However, without the control of international observers, the Crimea certainly will not remain. The desire to visit the Russian peninsula in March was expressed by a number of international observers who had already visited the Crimea on a single voting day on September 10.

In the 2012 presidential elections in Russia, the OSCE / ODIHR was the second most observer observer mission. Then 262 representatives of the bureau came to Russia.