DONETSK, October 18. /TASS/: The Ukrainian armed forces have opened fire on unmanned aerial vehicles of the OSCE mission near the Petrovskoye-Bogdanovka disengagement area twice over the past week, one of them was destroyed, DPR people’s militia spokesman Eduard Basurin said on Friday.
"The Ukrainian armed forces opened fire on the unmanned aerial vehicles of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission twice using small arms, one of these drones was destroyed," the Donetsk News Agency quotes him as saying.
Basurin noted that OSCE observers had suspended work to monitor the situation in the Petrovskoye-Bogdanovka disengagement area because of that.
On Thursday, Russian Permanent Representative to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Alexander Lukashevich said that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) had registered Ukraine’s increased military presence in the disengagement area.
On October 1, the parties to the conflict in eastern Ukraine agreed at a meeting of the Contact Group in Minsk to start disengagement of forces at Zolotoye and Petrovskoye, which was later put off until October 9. The Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics reiterated more than once that they were ready to begin troop withdrawal, but there has been no response from Kiev.
On Tuesday, the Contact Group on the settlement in eastern Ukraine failed to agree on a new date for disengagement at Zolotoye and Petrovskoye.
