MOSCOW, April 19. /TASS/. Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky called the facts of espionage by the staff of the OSCE mission in Donbass blatant.

"Here is a scandal with the Special Monitoring Mission of the OSCE, we also had the opportunity to observe and which, as I understand it, is still flaring up in connection with the use of data. Our fellow journalists dug up the whole thing. Of course, details are yet to be seen, but what I saw is, of course, blatant," he told the Solovyov Live television channel on Monday.

"It's hard to even imagine that an international organization, especially one that has a mandate, can do this," he stressed.

On April 15, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) announced that it had opened a criminal case for espionage against several employees of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission. According to its information, the OSCE employees, while in the DPR, including in the Kiev-controlled territories, used video equipment to record the location of units of the republic's People's Militia, state bodies and institutions. The information was collected in electronic format, "after which the data constituting state secrets was transferred to representatives of foreign intelligence agencies, including the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)."

OSCE mission in Ukraine

The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission began its work in Ukraine on March 21, 2014, following a consensus decision by all 57 participating states. The mission brings together nearly 1,000 observers. The offices are located in Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk.

In early March, OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid announced the evacuation from Ukraine of nearly 500 SMM observers after the start of Russia’s special operation.

On March 1, the DPR mission to the Joint Center for Ceasefire Control and Coordination reported that the mission’s foreign staff had left the republic.

According to Russian permanent representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has recently been playing along with official Kiev in its reports, and monitoring has increasingly become a mechanism for disorienting the international community about the events that are taking place on the ground.

On April 9, the DPR territorial defense headquarters made a decision to recognize the extension of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission activities on the republic's territory as unlawful. It has to stop its activities by 30 April. Moreover, on April 8, it became known that one of the SMM observers in the republic was detained for activities "incompatible with the mission's mandate.".