Ukraine Crisis Escalating: OSCE Loses Contact with 2nd Team, Moscow Slams Kiev’s Brutality

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Friday it had lost contact with a second four-member international team in restive eastern Ukraine.

The Vienna-based security body said it had not heard from its team in the industrial region of Lugansk since Thursday evening when it was stopped “by armed men” at a roadblock in the town of Severodonetsk.

“The team was comprised of four international monitors and a Ukrainian translator,” the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission for Ukraine said in a statement posted on Facebook.

“The team was traveling in two cars.”

The organization added that another four members who were detained by separatist rebels in the neighboring Donetsk region on Monday were still missing.
The self-proclaimed “people’s mayor” of the Donetsk region rebel stronghold of Slavyansk confirmed on Thursday that the OSCE team that went missing on Monday was being held on suspicions of spying.

Another pro-Russian rebel from the little-known Southeastern Front claimed in a statement issued to the Interfax news agency earlier on Friday that his men had detained the team in Lugansk.
But a spokesman for the self-proclaimed “Lugansk People’s Republic” denied that the group was being held against its will.
“Nobody arrested the four OSCE observers,” Volodymyr Inogorodskiy added.
“They finished their work late [Thursday] night in Severodonetsk and we advised them not to leave the city because of the [security]situation,” said the spokesman.

The Special Monitoring Mission currently has 210 unarmed civilian members from European nations and 70 local staff who are supposed to facilitate dialogue between pro-Russian separatists and state authorities.
But their mission has been treated with suspicion by the rebels throughout their seven-week insurgency.
Seven OSCE monitors were branded “prisoners of war” and held in Slavyansk for eight days prior to their release under pressure from both the West and Russia on May 3. An eighth member of that group was set free due to ill-health after two days.

Another group of 11 OSCE observers was detained in the Donetsk province on Wednesday. The OSCE said it had managed to re-establish contact with them by the end of the night.
The latest disappearance of European monitors in the vital rust belt region underscores the trouble newly elected president Petro Poroshenko will have keeping his ex-Soviet republic intact.

Rebels in control of the Lugansk and Donetsk government buildings have declared independence and are seeking a merger with Russia similar to that accomplished by Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea following its seizure by pro-Kremlin troops in March.

Meanwhile, Russia’s FSB security force said Friday it had detained a group of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who were plotting “terrorist” attacks targeting Crimea after its annexation by Russia in March.
The FSB, the successor to the KGB, said in a statement that those detained were members of the Right Sector paramilitary group of Ukrainian ultranationalists.
“The main aim of this group’s criminal activities was to commit terrorist acts of sabotage in the [Crimean] cities of Simferopol, Yalta and Sevastopol and then to destroy a number of infrastructure buildings, railway bridges and electric power lines,” the FSB said.

One of the detainees included Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director, whose detention was sharply criticized by one of Russia’s best known film directors, Alexander Sokurov.
“I think this person has nothing to do with terrorist activities,” Sokurov told Echo of Moscow radio station adding that Sentsov was in his right to be active politically.
The statement said the four were all facing investigations into “terrorism”, organizing a “terrorist” group and arms trafficking.
They will be charged shortly, the FSB said.
The FSB said the detained had planned a bomb attack on the Eternal Flame war memorial and a Lenin statue in Crimea’s main city of Simferopol on the eve of May 9’s Victory Day holiday.

The group is also alleged to have plotted arson attacks on an NGO and the headquarters of ruling party United Russia in Simferopol.
Also on Friday, Russia accused Kiev’s armed forces of breaching international law protecting civilians in wartime by killing and wounding peaceful citizens as it fights pro-Russian insurgents.

The Investigative Committee, the Russian equivalent of the FBI, said in a statement that Ukraine’s armed forces as well as its National Guard and the Right Sector ultra-nationalist group caused civilian deaths “in breach of the Geneva Convention of 1949 on protecting the civilian population in time of war.”
“Those guilty of the deaths of peaceful civilians and children according to all the canons of international law must bear responsibility for this,” the statement said.
Russia said it had opened a criminal case under Russian law to probe “the use of banned means and methods in fighting a war.”

Russia said it was launching its own investigation because “today there is not one country in the world that is able to accept the obvious, that the actions of the Ukrainian authorities are criminal.”
It cited last Sunday’s deaths of Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli and his assistant, Russian rights activist Andrei Mironov, in a firefight in the rebel-held flashpoint of Slavyansk and the week-long detention of two Russian journalists from a pro-Kremlin website Life News by Ukrainian security forces.
It also listed the deaths of wounded rebels being transported in an open truck during a raid on Donetsk airport this week.

It mentioned the “bombardment of the cities of Slavyansk, Kramatorsk, Donetsk, Mariupol and other residential areas in the proclaimed Donestk and Lugansk People’s Republics.”
Russia believes Ukraine’s armed forces “deliberately, with the aim of murdering peaceful citizens, used weapons, artillery, aviation, including with United Nations emblems and armament of combat vehicles and hardware.”
“As a result, there are dead and wounded among the peaceful population,” the Investigative Committee said.

It said that Ukrainian armed forces had also partly or wholly destroyed infrastructure including “hospitals, kindergartens and schools.”

“The actions against the peaceful population have forced a number of residents of the Republic of Ukraine and the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, some of them Russian citizens, to flee their homes,” it said.