Insurgents say they have missing OSCE observers

Vyacheslav Ponomarev is an Eastern Ukranian rebel leader Keystone

An insurgent leader in Eastern Ukraine has said his group kidnapped four observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), among them a Swiss. The group had been missing since Tuesday.

Vyacheslav Ponomarev, who has declared himself mayor of the city of Slovyansk in the eastern Ukranian Donetsk region, told the media the monitors were safe and would be released.

“I addressed the OSCE mission to warn them that their people should not, over the coming week, travel in areas under our control. And they decided to show up anyway,” Ponomarev told the Associated Press.

“We will figure out who [the observers] are, where they were going and will then let them go,” he said to the Interfax news agency. The other members of the observer team come from Turkey, Denmark and Estonia.

On Wednesday, Swiss President Didier Burkhalter, who is leading the OSCE as part of Switzerland’s chairmanship of the organisation for 2014, denounced the kidnapping as “a sabotage of international efforts to help Ukraine survive this crisis”.

He added the observers were doing important work; they form part of a larger team of 282 observers who are on the ground gathering information about the political situation in Ukraine and who also observed the presidential elections on May 25.

Rebels in Eastern Ukraine have declared the Donetsk and Luhansk regions independent from the rest of Ukraine, supported by controversial referendums rejected by Ukraine and the West. That has led to clashes with Ukrainian forces and appeals by the rebels to join Russia. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has so far ignored that request in the face of Western sanctions and isolation.

Putin has said he would back a peace plan brokered by the Swiss-led OSCE that lays out a plan for ending the violence and creating a political dialogue.