VIENNA, January 16. /TASS/. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said on Monday that it is not present in Donbass.
"The OSCE is not present in #Donbas. Should you see any vehicles with OSCE markings in Donbas, know that they are not used for OSCE purposes," a statement on its Twitter page said.
The OSCE special monitoring mission (SMM) began its work in Ukraine in 2014. Last March, its mandate was not extended. At that time, Russia’s Permanent Envoy to the organization Alexander Lukashevich noted that in its recent reports the mission was playing up to Kiev while its monitoring was increasingly misleading the global community. In early March 2022, OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid announced the evacuation of almost 500 OSCE observers from Ukraine following the onset of Russia’s special military operation on February 24, 2022. On March 1, 2022, the mission employees left the Slavyanskaya hotel in Lugansk and departed in an unknown direction.
In April, then-LPR head Leonid Pasechnik banned the operation of the OSCE mission in the republic. He said that over a period of eight years it had never contributed to efforts to settle the conflict in Donbass. Later, two members of the Lugansk SMM team were detained on suspicion of treason.
On September 19, the Supreme Court of the Lugansk People’s Republic sentenced the two detainees, Dmitry Shabanov and Maxim Petrov, to 13 years in prison on high treason charges. On January 13, 2023, the LPR reported that the republic’s State Security Ministry opened a criminal case for espionage against another employee of the OSCE mission, leader of the technical monitoring group David Orrells. He is accused of passing on information about the positions of the LPR’s People’s Militia and the locations of civilian infrastructure facilities.