UNITED NATIONS, June 18. /TASS/. Russia is calling on the UN Security Council to discuss Ukraine’s diversion in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) last week, during which five LPR officers were killed, the Russian mission to the UN said in a statement published on its website on Thursday.

According to the document, "on June 17, during the closed consultations of the Security Council <…> Russia brought the attention of its Security Council colleagues" to what happened. The Russian mission informed that in the early hours of June 11, a sabotage group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces infiltrated the observation post of the Lugansk Region’s people’s militia in the area of the Golubovskoye settlement, killing five militia officers.

"Russia is calling on Security Council members to condemn this mindless and brutal attack of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on Lugansk militia officers, which is a direct violation of the Minsk Agreements and additional ceasefire control measures dated July 22, 2020, that ban reconnaissance and sabotage activity of the parties," the statement says.

The Russian mission pointed out that direct assistance to the Kiev government by Western states is of special concern. The statement says that since April 13, US military experts have been training Ukrainian snipers in a camp near Mariupol, located in the near vicinity of the conflict. "It is not a secret even to the media that US companies are supplying sniper rifles and munitions to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. These US deliveries of weapons and military equipment to Ukraine are pushing Kiev to destabilize the situation in Donbass and attempt to resolve the conflict by force."

The mission added that the June 11 provocation was staged by the Ukrainian government right after the phone call between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his US counterpart Joe Biden and after Zelensky’s trip to the line of contact in Donbass on June 8-9. The document points out that this diversion was carried out in the run-up to the G7 and NATO summits, the EU-US summit and the meeting between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin.