Lavrov called on the OSCE not to hush up the war crimes of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
It is high time for the OSCE mission to specify data on violations of the Minsk agreements, so that it becomes clear to the world community who the real “aggressor” is in Donbass.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated this at a press conference, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“As for the OSCE SMM, we actively support this mechanism, which has a clear mandate to work throughout Ukraine, not only in Donbass, but also in other regions in terms of monitoring respect for human rights, national minorities, monitoring attempts to revive neo-Nazi tendencies. Unfortunately, the Mission pays insufficient attention to this part of its mandate; we brought this to the attention of its head, Chevik,” Lavrov said.
“That aspect of the OSCE’s activities, which, first of all, attracts the attention of the international community, I mean monitoring how the Minsk agreements are implemented in Donbass, also raises some questions for us. In particular, the mission prefers to report on ceasefire violations and shelling of civilian targets in the abstract - “for such and such a period, so many shellings took place,” it is not said from which side. “So many civilians were injured, so many civilian infrastructures were destroyed.”
It is not the first year that we have been insisting that the mission be specific in its assessments and that it report who is more to blame for such attacks, who starts them, and who responds to them.
With the help of our representation in the OSCE, based on the daily reports that the SMM issues, we were able to carry out painstaking work, analyzing the data that did end up in the public space. A very specific picture emerges from this analysis - more than 80 percent of shelling of civilian targets falls on the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Of the civilian casualties on both sides of the contact, more than 80% of the victims were on the side of the militia,” said the head of the Foreign Ministry.
He specified that, in other words, the lion's share of responsibility for violations of the ceasefire agreement lies with the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“I believe that in order for all members of the OSCE and the world community as a whole to have an objective picture of what is happening with the implementation of the Minsk agreements, the OSCE is obliged to fulfill its commitment, which has not been fulfilled for several years, and to present a detailed thematic, analytical report on the one who initiates the violation of the ceasefire, who fires, first of all, at civilian targets, through whose fault civilians are dying.
We have made a corresponding representation to the Albanian Chairmanship of the OSCE, and to the Conflict Prevention Center, and the General Secretariat of this organization, and Mr. Cevik, who heads this mission, bears personal responsibility for strict compliance with its mandate and for any attempts to hide the truth, to hide the objective presentation of information , so that we can all be guided by facts and not speculation,” Lavrov concluded.
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