“OSCE Chairman, Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau and OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid announced today that the OSCE will take immediate steps to close the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine,” the OSCE website said in a statement.
Rau noted that the OSCE will seek to continue its activities in Ukraine in accordance with existing OSCE commitments.
Earlier, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that a number of OSCE SMM personnel in Donbass were engaged in essentially illegal activities, which damaged the reputation of the organization.
Two employees of the Luhansk team of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) were detained on suspicion of treason.
Also, the Prosecutor General's Office of the DPR opened a criminal case against several members of the OSCE SMM.