You're reading: Associated Press: 57-nation group plays key Ukraine monitoring role

 A team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is going to try to help de-escalate Russian-Ukrainian tensions after the two nations agreed to work on reducing frictions sparked by Moscow's annexation of Crimea. But the Special Monitoring Mission of the 57-nation OSCE to Ukraine and other OSCE teams on the ground have no enforcing powers, limiting them to advisory and monitoring roles. The organization — which includes Russia, the United States, Canada, all European and some central Asian countries — also works mostly by consensus, which allowed Russia last month to block its team from going to Ukraine for a week.

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