After visiting the Donetsk airport for the first time since its destruction, monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe say the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine is mostly holding – but only in certain areas, and possibly only when monitors are present.
“The cease-fire does remain somewhat fragile” in many areas, especially Shirokino, said Michael Bociurkiw, the spokesman for the OSCE’s mission to Ukraine at a briefing on April 3.
“As long as guns continue to be fired, and as long as substantial amounts of heavy weaponry continue to be concentrated in offensive and defensive positions, achieving a comprehensive and sustainable ceasefire will be difficult,” he said. “We still see too much division, and too much distrust. And too much death and displacement,” he said, warning of a growing humanitarian catastrophe as more and more residents are forced to leave or live in dire conditions.
Alexander Hug, deputy chief monitor of the mission, said in comments to Ukrainian media the same day that the ceasefire seemed to be holding – at least when monitors were around.
“I just returned from Donetsk, where I was with my team and we were in the airport, and also in Spartak. It was quiet in the airport today, the ceasefire was holding, and I hope that it wasn’t just today and only for my sake,” Hug said in an interview with the 112 Ukraine television channel.
A report released by the International Crisis Group on April 1 warned of “cheating” by both sides throughout the cease-fire, citing several instances of weaponry being moved when monitors were present but then put right back in place after they left.
Bociurkiw said the distrust on both sides of the conflict has hampered the OSCE’s efforts to gain access to many areas, with both Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists often hassling international monitors or denying them entry to certain areas altogether. “We have good days and we have bad days. But there are delays ranging from just a few minutes, when colleagues’ documents are looked at, to several hours to no access whatsoever.” “We should be able to go any place at any time,” he said, noting that there were several “no-go areas,” especially the eastern part of the Donetsk Oblast and the southern part of Luhansk, where “Cossack groups are in control.” The findings from the OSCE mission’s trip to Donetsk were released just one day after heavy criticism of the OSCE’s effectiveness in eastern Ukraine, as retired U.S. General Wesley Clark slammed the organization as “essentially non-functional.”
Clark lamented the fact that the OSCE had “only a couple of observation points” on the border with Russia and said it lacked oversight in its monitoring of the conflict.
Clark also implied that the OSCE mission had been compromised by Russian military forces. Bociurkiw said the OSCE would not comment directly on Clark’s comments but that the points he raised were nothing new.
“These issues frequently come up,” he said, noting that the work monitors were doing in Ukraine was a “24/7 operation” with many working late into the night compiling reports. Monitors also conduct 30-40 patrols a day, he said.
The border between Ukraine and Russia is a sprawling 410 kilometers, making it next to impossible for the OSCE to monitor all of it. As for speculation on Russian involvement in the OSCE’s monitoring mission, Bociurkiw said there were only about 25 Russian monitors out of more than 400. While the OSCE mission found Donetsk to be mostly peaceful, Ukrainian media has cited residents as saying artillery fire was heard late at night – an issue Bociurkiw acknowledged was also frequently raised. “We don’t have monitors working at night for safety reasons,” he said.
Fighters from Ukrainian battalions in the east relate to the ceasefire with great skepticism, noting that attacks and skirmishes still happen in certain areas on a day-to-day basis – they just aren’t witnessed by international observers.
Andrei Dyachenko, a spokesman for the Azov Battalion, told Ukrainian media that the “relative calm” in the region didn’t mean the situation was really peaceful, and that it was more likely calm only because OSCE monitors were present.
Kirill Onegin, a member of the Donbass Battalion, a volunteer unit of Ukraine’s National Guard, said he had just returned from Shirokino, where skirmishes and provocations were under way despite the ceasefire. “There are still constantly attacks, all the battalions out there have seen it,” Onegin said, adding that he didn’t expect the relative stability to last and that he thought the separatists might be off “getting armed.” “Everything is in full swing for them to renew efforts once everything dies down and it becomes easier to ride around in tanks again,” he said.
“If you compare the situation now to what was happening before the ceasefire, of course, it’s relatively calmer. The international observers are probably just so afraid of things returning to how they were before, that they already consider this normal. But in reality, the observers either just don’t see – or don’t want to see – these very obvious attacks,” Onegin said.
