Kyiv sometimes bars OSCE from weapon storage sites - Kelin
MOSCOW. March 13 (Interfax) - OSCE monitors in Ukraine have been reporting frequent rejection of their requests to visit Ukrainian heavy weapons storage sites, Russian Representative to the OSCE Andrei Kelin said in a statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.
"We are worried about a very large number of Ukrainian army refusals to monitor visits reported by the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM). The militia is interacting with the OSCE mission in a much better way," the Russian envoy said.
"For some reason, our Western partners, among them the esteemed representative of the European Union, prefer to ignore this. That is a strange type of shortsightedness," Kelin underlined.
He pointed to the lingering suspicions between the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics and the Ukrainian army about their preparedness to meet the Minsk agreements signed in February.
"The militia alleges that the heavy armaments withdrawn by the army are being brought back to the contact line. This is proven by SMM reports," Kelin said.
He cited a spot report issued by the SMM mission on March 11 as saying that a number of self-propelled artillery guns withdrawn by the army earlier had mysteriously disappeared from weapon storage sites.