DONETSK, April 15. /TASS/: The Prosecutor General's Office of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) has opened a criminal case for espionage against several employees of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, who passed state secrets to Ukraine, the press service of the DPR Prosecutor General's Office told TASS on Friday.
"A criminal case has been opened against several employees of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission on the established facts of collecting and storing with the purpose of transferring to the Ukrainian special services of information constituting state secrets," the Prosecutor General's Office said.
According to its information, the OSCE employees, while in the DPR, including in the Kiev-controlled territories, used video equipment to record the location of units of the republic's People's Militia, state bodies and institutions. The information was collected in electronic format, "after which the data constituting state secrets was transferred to representatives of foreign intelligence agencies, including the Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)."
The Prosecutor General's Office added that this data was then used by the Ukrainian military and special services to harm state interests, DPR’s security and sovereignty, including shelling settlements and places of deployment of the republic's People's Militia units.
"The criminal case has been sent to the DPR State Security Ministry for investigation," the Prosecutor General’s Office said.
OSCE mission in Ukraine
The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission began its work in Ukraine on March 21, 2014, following a consensus decision by all 57 participating states. The mission brings together nearly 1,000 observers. The offices are located in Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk.
In early March, OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid announced the evacuation from Ukraine of nearly 500 SMM observers after the start of Russia’s special operation.
On March 1, the DPR mission to the Joint Center for Ceasefire Control and Coordination reported that the mission’s foreign staff had left the republic. They arrived in Rostov-on-Don, from where they left the next day for Sochi to go to Istanbul.
In his turn, Russian permanent representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich stressed that with the emergence of the two sovereign republics, the DPR and LPR, as subjects of international relations, he did not see any sense in any monitoring missions on the territory of Donbass. According to him, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has recently been playing along with official Kiev in its reports, and monitoring has increasingly become a mechanism for disorienting the international community about the events that are taking place on the ground. On April 9, the DPR territorial defense headquarters made a decision to recognize the extension of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission activities on the republic's territory as unlawful. It has to stop its activities by 30 April. Moreover, on April 8, it became known that one of the SMM observers in the republic was detained for activities "incompatible with the mission's mandate.".
