© Sergey Averin/SputnikOSCE monitors seen near the checkpoint in Stanitsa Lugankaya.
On October 19th, 2017, the OSCE
reported that its mandate at two Russian Checkpoints had been extended to the end of January, 2018. The Mission's mandate in Ukraine itself on March 16th was extended by one year - to 31st March 2018. This, of course, is normal considering the fact that the deployment of the
OSCE in order to monitor the ceasefire is one of the points of the Minsk Agreements signed by OSCE representative Heidi Tagliavini, Ukrainian representative Leonid Kuchma, Russian representative Mikhail Zurabov, and the leaders of the DPR and LPR leaders Aleksandr Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnitsky back in 2015. Over the course of the mandate of the OSCE its work has been both critically and positively evaluated, some saying that the Mission's aim is to simply obfuscate the source of shelling, others saying that the employees of the Mission deeply care about the situation and try their best to separate fact from fiction. Looking at the situation objectively and within the framework of proportionate perspective, it does seem that there are more questions than answers concerning the Mission's work in Donbass.
The
blowing up of a OSCE vehicle earlier in 2017 certainly sent shockwaves around the organisation, putting into question the safety of its monitors in the Republics. Since then the OSCE has refused in many cases to document the results of shelling, citing their willingness to drive along roads that have not been previously declared as safe for travel. This, of course, is a convenient excuse when the culprit of the shelling of civilian areas is the Ukrainian Armed Forces. But excuses such as the example stated above are only necessary when information about events, such as shelling on residential areas (also known as war crimes), becomes known to the public. But what about events that are not reported by any media or press office?
At the disposal of Stalker Zone is information about such an unreported event:
the existence of a brothel in the settlement Severodonetsk on the territory of the Lugansk People's Public occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Comment: Anonymous purportedly hacked the Spanish Constitutional Court's website today. Puidgemont called the decision "the worst attack against the institutions and the people of Catalonia since the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco." He has called for a debate in the Catalonian parliament, the head of which called Rajoy's decision "an authoritarian coup within the EU." Hundreds of thousands are reportedly protesting the decision: