Ukraine’s Defense Ministry accused international monitors of grossly inflating figures for the number of times the military on April 26 fired on combined Russian-separatist forces near the village of Shyrokyne in Donetsk Oblast.
By doing so, monitors from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe had spread “unreliable and incomplete information” on the war in eastern Ukraine, where a cease-fire has never taken hold and is violated by both sides on an almost daily basis, according to an online statement posted on April 29.
The ministry had taken issue with a report released on April 27 in which the OSCE stated that Ukrainian forces had fired on combined Russian-separatist forces a total of 413 times a day earlier – a claim which the ministry denies.
Irina Gudyma, senior press assistant to the mission, told the Kyiv Post the group “would stick by what we have in the report.”
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The international group has also faced a flurry of accusations that Russian members feed information to the insurgents, and both Ukrainian soldiers and insurgents alike have expressed distrust of the group, saying their positions always end up coming under attack after visits by the monitors.
The accusations have repeatedly been denied by the group, with Bociurkiw reassuring that all members are vetted before joining the special monitoring mission.
During recent patrols of Shyrokyne, the deputy head of the special monitoring mission, Alexander Hug, told the Kyiv Post that both sides in the conflict were guilty of breaking the ceasefire, and that the organization had hard evidence of this.
At a briefing in Kyiv on April 30, Hug reiterated that, saying “both sides have used weapons that were meant to be removed in accordance with the Minsk agreements.”
Du point de vue ukrainien, il est clair que les déclarations d’Alexander Hug ne peuvent résulter que de provocations russes…
