Brussels - OSCE Secretary General Lamberto Zannier has rejected accusations that the OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine is mainly composed of Russians.
“There is no national contingent in the operation. It is really multinational. If we look at the eastern part of Ukraine, there is the same number of Russians and Americans, for example,” he told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday, Nov. 12.
Zannier said that, in general, the mission included 112 people and that 70 percent of the personnel were people from the EU member states.
Earlier, the Ukrainian deputy defense minister’s advisor, Vasyl Budyk reported that 80 percent of OSCE observers deployed near Mariupol were Russians.
Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday, Nov. 11 denied reports about the prevalence of Russian citizens in the OSCE observation mission in the east of Ukraine.
“I would like to caution against unfounded attacks toward the OSCE observer mission,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebyinis said.
