Donbas terrorist leader threatens to kill armed OSCE police

Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the head of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, said on April 25 that his government will view the possible arrival of OSCE armed police on his territory as an unlawful military intervention, as reported by Interfax-Ukraine.

“I will shoot all OSCE armed forces so that they don’t even have the desire to come here with a gun,” he said. “The monitoring mission has a mandate for monitoring, so not a single OSCE armed officer should arrive here,” he said.

Zenon Zawada: The threat of Donbas militias, uncontrolled by the Kremlin, is one of the risks we mentioned yesterday in assessing the president’s announcement on Sunday that Russia supports dispatching armed OSCE police to the Donbas conflict zone.

However, Zakharchenko is fully controlled by the Kremlin and we assess his words as political talk, intended to boost the Russian position in the ongoing negotiations to hold local elections by the summer. With such sharp rhetoric however, the international community should keep in mind the risks surrounding an armed intervention in Donbas. The situation could be further destabilized instead of stabilized.