Ukraine insists on round-the-clock work for OSCE Mission at checkpoints
Ukraine has insisted that the OSCE Mission and the Red Cross work near the gate checkpoints for 24 hours a day.
This was posted on Facebook by a member of the humanitarian subgroup at the Minsk negotiations, Iryna Herashchenko, after a meeting of the subgroup on Tuesday.
“Generally speaking, Ukraine supports the idea that the ICRC [International Committe of the Red Cross] and the OSCE have permanent posts when working close to all the checkpoints. Also, they should not just go there for only 15 minutes a day, they should be working 24 hours a day,” she posted.
According to her, she “has put the question of opening the checkpoint in Zolote point-blank, which has been blocked since the 31st of March. However, based on various invented pretexts, the separate districts of the Luhansk region have not allowed this checkpoint to open and have repeatedly and indefinitely delayed its opening”.
Herashchenko has repeated that for the past two years, Russia has been ignoring all of Ukraine’s inquiries, and that they also have not given any official information as to how many Ukrainian citizens have left the Donbas and moved to the territory of the Russian Federation, and also what the legal status of these citizens is.
According to her, the separatists have realized that there are fraudulent firms in the occupied territories that issue bogus certificates for pensioners to be used for social benefits. People from the occupied territories then receive payments in Ukraine because of these fictitious documents.
“Even though the representatives of the separate districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions have already admitted it, it has become even more obvious how important it is for Ukraine, in the scope of social benefits, to regain power over the occupied territories, and to then restore the normal process of the pension fund social services in these areas,” Herashchenko added.
She reported that Viktor Medvedchuk and representatives of the Security Service of Ukraine, who manage the procedure of freeing the hostages, would join the group on Wednesday. On the 9th of November, the report of OSCE Coordinator, Toni Frisch, regarding his visits to the occupied territories and to prisons where hostages are kept, would be made public.
“We will make every effort to release our guys,” Herashchenko added.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had previously said that at the Normandy format summit, an agreement was reached with regard to changing some OCSE SMM monitoring posts to a 24-hour duty mode.