You're reading: Russian diplomat: OSCE observers in Ukraine trying to be impartial

Observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) sent to Ukraine to monitor the ongoing events are trying to make impartial judgments, Russian envoy to the OSCE Andrei Kelin said in an interview published in the Thursday issue of Kommersant.

“The special mission members are trying to work impartially. However,
some elements of value judgment are seen in some reports. For instance,
the demonstrators favoring Ukraine’s federalization are called
pro-Russian. We can’t do anything with this – it’s the media that have
introduced the pro-Russian category as well as the anti-Maidan one,”
Kelin said.

“However, I haven’t noticed any bias or openly negative attitudes
toward those who are demonstrating in Donetsk and other regions in the
southeastern part of Ukraine. We don’t have radical differences,” he
said.

An OSCE mission numbering about 100 people has currently been
deployed in Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Ivano-Frankivsk,
Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Luhansk, Lviv, and Odesa, and this is not the
only group currently working in Ukraine, he said.

“There is also a long-term mission dealing with preparations for the May 25 presidential elections,” he said.

Another group is military observers, he said.

“This is a small group that the Ukrainian authorities have invited to
monitor the situation near the border. They left for the Sumy region
yesterday. True, it’s unclear what they are doing there, while the main
events are developing in other places, such as the areas of Kramatorsk,
Slovyansk, and Izyum,” he said.

Kelin dismissed the possibility that observers from the OSCE mission could be admitted to Crimea.