MOSCOW, April 28 (RIA Novosti) – Russia will send its representatives to Monday’s emergency meeting by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss the release of the organization’s monitors detained in eastern Ukraine last week.
“We will take part,” Russia’s permanent envoy to OSCE, Andrei Kelin, said.
An OSCE spokeswoman, Tatyana Bayeva, earlier said that the meeting of the organization’s Permanent Council will focus on “current security challenges in OSCE states and OSCE’s cooperation with Ukraine.”
She said all 57 member states will attend the event, organized on the initiative of OSCE’s current chair Switzerland, “to exchange views and make decisions.”
Pro-federalization protesters detained members of an OSCE mission and Ukrainian military officials who were escorting them in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk.
Protest leader Vyacheslav Ponomaryov said Monday the OSCE military observers being held as prisoners of war in Slaviansk could be freed in exchange for the release of federalization supporters taken hostage by Kiev.
After talks on Sunday, the self-defense forces agreed to release one of the OSCE team’s members, a Swedish military officer named Ingvi Thomas Johanson. A source in the self-defense forces said Johanson was freed as “he had health problems and Sweden is not a NATO member state, and also as a show of good intentions and negotiability.” The OSCE said in a statement on its website that Johanson is diabetic.
Eastern Ukraine has been hit by pro-federalization protests in mainly Russian-speaking regions. The coup-imposed Ukrainian government earlier announced a special operation to crack down on the unrest.
No comments :
Post a Comment