More than 5,000 people rallied Friday in Donetsk, the main base of pro-Russian insurgents in east Ukraine, to protest the presence of OSCE monitors in the war-ravaged region. The demonstration was the latest in a series of rallies organised by pro-Moscow rebels against the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe - a post-Cold War body created to maintain peace on the continent.
The OSCE's Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) has 580 unarmed staff based in the conflict zone and recently had its mandate extended to the end of March 2017. The OSCE decided in March 2014 to send an unarmed civilian monitoring mission to Ukraine for an initial period of three months at Kiev's request. Insurgent leaders accuse the group of issuing biased daily dispatches about the 26-month war that blame much of the violence on their various militia groups.
Friday's rally was organised against the backdrop of attempts by Ukraine's pro-Western leadership to create an armed police force in the east that could help end the fighting and control rebel-held portions of Ukraine's border with Russia. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Ukraine's allies accuse Moscow of sending troops and weapons across the porous frontier - an accusation Russia denies despite accounts of such movements from both foreign monitors and reporters on the ground.
Donetsk separatist leader Denis Pushilin told the pro-Russian crowd that an armed OSCE presence contradicted the principles of a repeatedly-broken truce deal that most sides signed up to in February 2015. "We have gathered here to say a firm no to an armed OSCE mission," said Pushilin. "Poroshenko wants to make the OSCE into a third side of this conflict," he said.
Ukraine's 26-month war has claimed the lives of nearly 9,400 people with a recent surge in violence not seen since the signing of a December 2015 armistice. The conflict has shattered Moscow's relations with Washington with Russia respond to US and EU economic sanctions by banning imports of most Western food. Moscow said last weekend for the first time that it would agree to allow foreign monitors carry pistols "in self-defence".
"We have proposed that there are reinforced, 24-hour teams of OSCE monitors in places of heavy weapons storage," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a state television interview. "We also said that we will be ready to agree if the OSCE decides to give its monitors on the line of contact and in places of heavy weapons storage the right to carry weapons." But Moscow's offer falls far short of Kiev's demand that monitors be stationed along the border as well at certain hotspots. The decision to deploy a police mission would require the agreement of the OSCE's 57 participating states, including Russia.