DONETSK, January 18. /TASS/. OSCE’s report on recent events in Donbas is unbiased, deputy speaker of the Donetsk Republic’s (DPR) People’s Council Denis Pushilin said on Sunday.
“Their [OSCE’s] trend towards unbiased adequate perception of the situation in Donbas is appreciated in the Donetsk Republic, though we should like their representatives to be working still more actively, giving bigger comments on the damages and victims in the shelling delivered by Ukraine’s military,” he said in an interview with the Donetsk news agency.
He said “OSCE has prepared an absolutely adequate report” from the scene of firing at a bus in Volnovakha, which claimed 13 lives.
“We would be curious to see reaction from the Ukrainian side, how they would translate the report.”
Information of the OSCE, published on Saturday disproves the allegation voiced by Kiev and Washington that militias of the self-proclaimed republics are guilty in the tragedy near the city of Volnovakha, in which 13 bus passengers were killed, Russia’s Permanent Representative at the OSCE Andrey Kelin told TASS on Saturday.
“The observers established that the fire had been opened with the Grad [multiple launch rocket system] but from a northern direction. It disproves the hypothesis voiced by Kiev and backed up in Washington that the militias shelled [the bus] from an eastern direction,” Kelin said commenting on the daily report of the special monitoring mission in Ukraine that had conducted their own investigation into the accident.
“The direction is different and it arouses lots of questions if these were militias or not and casts doubts on who is responsible for the tragedy with the bus,” Kelin said. “It is difficult to say from Vienna who conducted the shelling but lots of questions are coming up.”
Earlier in the day, the OSCE published a daily report as of January 16 announcing the results of the Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine’s investigation into the accident.
“The SMM [Special Monitoring Mission] conducted a comprehensive inspection, focusing on five craters caused by explosions that had occurred during the incident. The investigation included comprehensive crater analysis of two specific blast craters, including the crater located 10 metres from the side of the passenger bus. In the SMM’s assessment all craters examined were caused by rockets fired from a north-north-eastern direction,” reads the report.
On January 13, an accident occurred with a bus en route from the city of Donetsk to Zlatoustlovka (Ukraine), killing 12 civilians and wounding another 16.
Kiev says the bus came under shelling with the multiple launch rocket systems fired by the militias of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic /DPR/.
At the same time, the DPR has denied its involvement in the accident and has claimed the deaths resulted from a provocation on the Ukrainian side.
Combat actions between the Ukrainian military and militias of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics during Kiev’s military operation in the country’s east conducted since mid-April 2014 have claimed over 4,000 lives and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, according to UN data.