Putin Invited UN Peacekeepers to Make Donbass a Safer Place
The OSCE approved the idea of sending a UN peacekeeping mission to Donbass. The contingent will help to make the monitoring mission's work safer. Now, armored cars and vests are, in fact, the only means of defense against Ukrainian military’s shelling. Varvara Nevskaya saw how the OSCE representatives work.
The morning of hundreds of employees of the OSCE monitoring mission in Donbass begins the same, six days a week. Breakfast and departure on a pre-determined route. As a rule, the final destination is located near the front line, and being there is unsafe even for trained military. You can see it all. The observers’ cars have no protection or convoy. It’s also known that the OSCE mission isn’t armed and can’t defend itself if there is any dangerous situation. The village of Petrovskoye. In 2001, a little less than 400 people lived there. Now, the settlement seems to have been completely abandoned.
The houses were destroyed by artillery fire, the wires stretched along this almost destroyed asphalt-paved road warn that you can’t go any further. The terrain is still mined. Here is one of the points of OSCE's video surveillance. The camera records 24 hours a day. The front line is literally a kilometer away. Of the visible means of protection, the employees of the monitoring mission have armored cars and body armor with helmets. Although this is, of course, not a full package of the measures that are used in the OSCE to ensure security.
The OSCE doesn’t say which exactly, but, unfortunately, even they don’t guarantee 100% protection. The tragic death of one of my colleagues a few months ago constantly reminds me that the work we’re doing is very dangerous. Thus, the protection and security of our observers is our priority. In April of this year, a car of the monitoring mission blew up on a landmine in the Lugansk Region.
Working on the front line, the OSCE observers regularly come under fire from small arms and mortars. Only during the so-called "bread ceasefire" this year this happened twice. In early August, near the Donetsk filtering station, when the observers tried to install a recording camera, and at the end of July, near the pumping station of the Yuzhnodonbass water pipeline. The security structures of the unrecognized republics have also repeatedly warned of the prevented terrorist attacks of the Ukrainian sabotage groups that were prepared against the mission's employees.
The Donetsk People's Republic really has every opportunity to ensure the security of the OSCE special monitoring mission. We repeatedly proposed this initiative each time there were questions about various kinds of threats. And unfortunately, the Special Monitoring Mission always found a chance, referring to the mandate, and refused our help. The mandate approved by 57 OSCE participating states doesn’t allow to accept assistance in ensuring safety of the monitoring mission. According to the document, the OSCE has the right to access the whole territory of Ukraine and the self-proclaimed republics. Any escort would make this access conditional.
The introduction of UN peacekeeping forces to protect observers wouldn’t contradict the mandate and, at the same time, could guarantee the safety of the mission members. The main office of the OSCE has already approved this initiative of the Russian President.