Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has said on direct involvement of Russia in kidnapping of members of the OSCE Special monitoring mission and in organizing and supporting terrorist activities in the eastern regions of Ukraine.
An undeniable proof of this has become telephone calls of the ataman of the Great Host of Don Cossacks Nikolai Kozitsyn, made public by the Security Service of Ukraine, that establish a direct link of the so-called Russian Cossack structures coordinated from Moscow with weapons supply to terrorist organizations operating in the East of Ukraine, as well as with the kidnapping of members of the OSCE Special monitoring mission on May 29, 2014.
“We demand from the coordinators from Moscow immediately give the order to its gangs to release the hostages, including the OSCE monitors, who enjoy privileges and immunities under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, and to end terror against the Ukrainian citizens in the eastern regions of Ukraine,” reads the statement from the Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry information policy department.
“We call on the international community to condemn the actions of the leadership of the Russian Federation aimed at continued destabilization of the situation in the eastern regions of Ukraine. We also call on the international community to force the Russian side to stop exporting and organizing terrorist activities in Ukraine that threaten the entire civilized world,” follows from the ministry’s commentary.
It been reported that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) recently established that the Russian Cossacks are involved in the kidnapping of the group of foreign monitors and in supply of arms to the terrorist organizations working on the east of Ukraine.
The first group of OSCE monitors went missing in Donetsk region at the border with Luhansk region on May 26.
Contact was lost with the second group on May 29 at a checkpoint near Severodonetsk in Luhansk region. According to the latest information, monitors were stopped by armed people.
These 2 monitoring groups of the OSCE mission included a total of eight people and one interpreter. The first group comprised citizens of Switzerland, Estonia, Turkey and Denmark. The information on the citizenship of the second group does not exist for now.
