© Sputnik / Valery MelnikovDmitry Shabanov seen in court in Lugansk
In two separate cases, a translator with the mission, Maksim Petrov, and one of its employees, Dmitry Shabanov, were found guilty of committing high treason. Each was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
According to Lugansk's State Security Service, Petrov had been collecting information about a military unit, working directly for a handler with a US spy agency. Shabanov is said to have also colluded with an unspecified foreign intelligence service. The cases were heard behind closed doors and the exact circumstances of the treason remain unknown.
The head of the LPR, Leonid Pasechnik, banned the OSCE monitoring mission from the republic back in April. He explained that during the conflict between the Donbass republics and Ukraine, which has dragged on since 2014, the mission never actually contributed to the peace process, routinely failed to properly register numerous violations by Kiev, and ultimately became popularly known as "blind observers".
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev's failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev's main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and "create powerful armed forces."
In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked.
I was personally threatened with police investigation for sharing a link to their official site on mainstream media discussion just when the "Russia invaded Ukraine" nonsense began.. They tried to label ME as a supporter of "genocide" when I explicitly mentioned that genocide of Ukrainians is going on since 2014 to this very day and posting the aforementioned link..
Thankfully there is no legislative that could sentence me as a "genocide supporter" for sharing a link to OSCE site with daily reports about Ukraine casualties in Donbass, so I got away with it with mere PERMABAN on all mainstream platforms
Soon after the whole OSCE got disbanded, I guess they were not obedient enough to TPTB, despite being "blind observers" all along.. It was never enough. Let it serve a lesson to the spineless fools in charge of OSCE back then.. they could have done so much more by championing the truth, but they chose to lie their heads low.. Good riddance.
Evil never, ever liked the Truth, that will never change.. so the true Evil will always be discernable by that. F*cking hypocrites.