MOSCOW. October 22. /TASS/. Double standards practiced by the OSCE give Kiev a feeling of impunity, Vladislav Deinego, Foreign Minister of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) and its chief negotiator in the Contact Group, said at a roundtable meeting at TASS on Friday.
In the morning of October 13, a Ukrainian reconnaissance party seized an officer of the LPR mission to the JCCC in the disengagement zone near the settlement of Zolotoye during road clearance works that had been previously agreed with the Ukrainian side. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) has been using various pretexts not to record this fact in its reports until today.
"Double standards used by the OSCE when making reports on the situation in Donbass are one of the factors that give the Ukrainian side the feeling of impunity," Deinego said.
He pointed to the "OSCE’s passivity in both the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine and in the Contact Group, dodging not only concrete steps but even any discussion of Kiev’s unlawful actions, even in those cases when they are obvious from the point of view of international standards, instead of taking active steps to settle the incident." He described the OSCE’s positions as "absolute silence and inaction."
Such position of an international organization "in no way helps resolve the key task — to promote the settlement of the conflict — and in no way meets the goals of this organization — to ease tension and ensure peace and stability," he said, adding that the authority of the OSCE mission in Donbass "in declining critically."
"It is important not to allow this mistrust to reach a critical level so that the mission can continue its work," he stressed.