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Crimean official says OSCE is used to spell out US position

Crimea’s Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Muradov made this comment regarding the OSCE report on the human rights situation on the peninsula, presented in Warsaw

SIMFEROPOL, September 28. /TASS/. Agencies of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) are used to spell out the position of the US Department of State, Director General of the Russian Association of International Cooperation, Crimea’s Deputy Prime Minister Georgy Muradov said on Monday, commenting on the OSCE report on the human rights situation on the peninsula, presented in Warsaw.

"I’ve had a chance to compare the OSCE report with the report by the US State Department," he told reporters. "There is an impression that the OSCE instruments are used to spell out the position of the State Department."

On September 21, OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) Astrid Thors asked Russia for an opportunity to visit Crimea. She made the request at the opening of the OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meeting.

According to her, the HCNM report on the human rights situation in Crimea is based on interviews, without visiting the peninsula. The report claims that after Crimea’s reunification with Russia, Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars found themselves in a difficult situation.

Director of the Department for Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Anatoly Viktorov, called the report one-sided and politicised. "The use of the terms ‘occupation’ and ‘annexation’ in respect of Crimea is unacceptable. This suggests that the [OSCE] Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the High Commissioner on National Minorities have autonomously taken an anti-Russian stance, openly playing into the hands of Kiev and its patrons in the West," he said.

According to Russia’s Permanent Representative to OSCE Alexander Lukashevich, Russia "is strongly dissatisfied with the report on Crimea, prepared by a mission nobody sent or invited." He said that the report, drawn up on the basis of interviews with a hundred of people who allegedly fled Crimea "is deliberately confusing the international community."

Lukashevich said last week that the OSCE agencies’ report on the situation with human rights in Crimea is "a political contract written with anti-Russian sentiments." "A political contract was fulfilled, paid to these two establishments that rudely violate their mandates," Lukashevich said. "I mean the ODIHR and High Commissioner on National Minorities," he told the Russian Rossiya-24 TV channel.

Russia’s envoy said that OSCE representatives had not made any visits to the Black Sea peninsula.

"Crimea has not received a mission and has not invited it. Nor collective decisions have been made to approve a report like this one," he said. "It was a sort of ‘guerrilla warfare’ which, by the way, certain participating countries had been ‘pushing.’"

Lukashevich said the report "was constructed in an aspect of rude anti-Russian sentiments and runs counter to the realities, being based on the interviews and contacts with hundreds of very odd people — refugees and displaced persons, who fled Crimea, alongside journalists in a negative mood."

"It is clear that those institutions were not going to imply unbiasedness," he said. "In our tough talk with the heads of these two institutions we underscored that the report created additional difficulties for a search of political solutions to major problems in Ukraine rather than helped to resolve the conflict."