LUGANSK, September 19. /TASS/. The Supreme Court of the Lugansk People’s Republic on Monday handed a 13-year prison sentence to a staffer of the OSCE mission, Dmitry Shabanov, found guilty of high treason under article 335 of the LPR Criminal Code.

Shabanov has the right to appeal the verdict within ten days.

Earlier, the LPR’s Ministry of State Security said that Shabanov was recruited in 2016 by a former agent of the Ukrainian security service SBU and the CIA’s station chief in Ukraine Andrey Lukashenko. From August 2021 to April 2022, Shabanov collected "information about the movements of military equipment and weapons, as well as personnel of the LPR people's militia." Shabanov "transmitted the information he gathered to the CIA agent via a smartphone with specialized software provided to him by the OSCE SMM (Special Monitoring Mission - TASS)," the security ministry said.

On April 30, the LPR’s leader Leonid Pasechnik banned the activities of the OSCE mission in his country. 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 the suspicion of treason.