SLOVYANSK, Ukraine – As Western governments vowed to impose more sanctions against Russia and its supporters in eastern Ukraine, a group of foreign military observers remained in captivity Saturday, accused of being NATO spies by a pro-Russian insurgency.
The German-led, eight-member team was traveling under the auspices of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe when they were detained Friday.
Vyacheslav Ponomarev, the self-proclaimed “people’s mayor” of Slovyansk, described the detained observers as “captives” and said they were officers from NATO member states.
“As we found maps on them containing information about the location of our checkpoints, we get the impression that they are officers carrying out a certain spying mission,” Ponomarev said, adding they could be released in exchange for jailed pro-Russian activists.
The foreign military observer team detained by pro-Russian forces was made up of three German soldiers, a German translator and one soldier each from Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Denmark. Germany’s Defense Ministry said the team also included five Ukrainians.
Tim Guldimann, the OSCE’s special envoy for Ukraine, told German public radio WDR on Saturday that “efforts are being made to solve this issue.” He declined to elaborate.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov late Friday to press for the release of the observers. In a statement released Saturday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said it was taking “all measures to resolve the situation,” but blamed the authorities in Kiev for failing to secure the safety of the team.
“The security of the inspectors is wholly entrusted to the host party,” the statement said. “Hence it would be logical to expect the current authorities in Kiev to resolve preliminary questions of the location, actions, and safety of the instructors.”
U.S. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he told his Russian counterpart, Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov in a telephone conversation last week that the observers could help stabilize the situation in Ukraine.
“We’ve got observers from the OSCE, some of whom have been denied access by pro-Russian groups and I suggested to him that one way we could contribute to some kind of stable outcome would be if he on his side and me on my side could seek to get those observers in there so that we could have a neutral party tell us what’s going on,” Dempsey told The Associated Press after a military symposium in Dallas.
The streets of Slovyansk were relatively calm Saturday. Hundreds of mourners, including Ponomarev, went to a local church to pay respects to a pro-Russian insurgent apparently killed during a clash with Ukrainian government troops earlier in the week.
Ukraine’s acting president this week ordered security forces to resume operations in the country’s east after the bodies of two people allegedly abducted by pro-Russia insurgents were found and a military aircraft was reported to have been hit by gunfire.
That came despite an international agreement calling for all sides in Ukraine to refrain from violence and for demonstrators to vacate public buildings. It didn’t specifically prohibit security operations, but Ukraine suspended an earlier so-called “anti-terrorist operation” after the accord.
