Eight members of a military monitoring mission were abducted on April 25 and are held hostage in the northern Donetsk Oblast city of Sloviansk by pro-Russian separatist forces, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said on Friday. The OSCE monitors were traveling by bus from Kramatorsk to Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine's interior ministry said.
“Communication
with the military observers in is Donetsk lost,” the OSCE stated on its Twitter
microblog. “The military verification team – led by Germans, and
composed of eight members, (including) four Germans, one Czech, one
Dane, one Pole and one Swede.”
The OSCE
said that the military verification team was sent to Ukraine under
the 2011 Vienna Document on transparency. Earlier in the day, the
Ukrainian authorities said that the hostages were representatives of
OSCE’s observation mission, but the organization said that all its
members are “safe and accounted for.”
The
abduction of international observers is bound to further escalate
tensions in the region, and worsen relations between Russia and the
West, already at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War
era.
Ukraine’s
Interior Ministry earlier said the bus was taken over around 11:40 a.m. on
the road going into Sloviansk, one of the strongholds of the
Russian-backed armed separatists. There were also five Ukrainian
soldiers and a driver in that bus, the ministry said in a statement.
The
hostages are reportedly being held in the State Security Service
building in Sloviansk, which has been under separatist control for
two weeks. Authorities said separatists refused to release them
until they consult “competent authorities of the Russian
Federation.”
The separatists in Sloviansk, Viacheslav Ponomariov, confirmed to
Interfax news agency that his militants captured a bus, without
giving any details about the people. “We really captured a bus,
there were banned explosive bullets and ammunition found,” he said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Deshchytsia said he was outraged by the attack . “We demand to release them immediately. Now members of the
mission are held together under control of terrorists,” he wrote on
his Twitter microblog.
Kyiv
Post Staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached
at [email protected]
