Russia 'sentences' OSCE Monitoring Mission official to 14 years on fake spying charges
Russia has once again hidden behind a pseudo court in its fake ‘Donetsk people’s republic’[‘DPR’] to sentence Vadym Golda, a former member of the OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine, to 14 years’ maximum-security imprisonment on ‘spying charges’ (Article 276 of Russia’s criminal code). Golda (as he was known, rather than Holda, at OSCE) is one of three Ukrainian OSCE employees seized in occupied Donbas in April 2022 and subjected to fabricated ‘trials’ held without any observance of rule of law, against men working under an international mandate. The sentence announced on 12 July has been roundly condemned by OSCE Chair-in-Office Ian Borg and OSCE Secretary General Helga Maria Schmid. Both have called on OSCE participating states and third parties to help secure the men’s release.
56-year-old Vadym Golda was security assistant for the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission [SMM] and was arrested in occupied Donetsk in late April 2022 while carrying out his work for the OSCE. Citing the unrecognized ‘DPR supreme court’, Russia’s prosecutor general’s office claims that “in 2021, while in DPR, Golda carried out an intelligence task in the interests of foreign military intelligence – he gathered data about industrial sites against which missile attacks were later carried out, this causing damage totally 100 million roubles.” There is no real effort to conceal the fact that this shocking ‘sentence’ is an attack on the OSCE’s Special Monitoring Mission [SMM] in Ukraine with the ‘court’ also ordering the confiscation of 43 armoured vehicles “used by employees of the OSCE SMM in Ukraine against the security of the Russian Federation.”
At the time of Golda’s seizure by the so-called ‘DPR ministry of state security’ at the end of April 2022, Denis Pushilin, Russian-installed ‘DPR leader’ claimed that the Ukrainian military had had access to the Monitoring Mission’s cameras, which they “could use to direct fire” at what he claimed was ‘DPR territory’. Pushilin also asserted that the OSCE had worked for Ukrainian and for foreign military intelligence, passing them data about the location and makeup of the ‘DPR forces’.
There were no grounds for the charges, and the only question is really why Golda has only been ‘sentenced’ now, and on a spying charge. Maksym Petrov and Dmytro Shabanov were also seized at the end of April 2022, albeit in occupied Luhansk. They were charged with ‘state treason’, with the fact that they were residents of the Russian proxy ‘Luhansk people’s republic’ being used as excuse for this extraordinary charge. Dmytro Shabanov, like Golda, was working as a security assistant, whereas Maksym Petrov worked as an interpreter. The claim then was that both men had been ‘recruited’ by Ukraine’s Security Service [SBU] and by the American CIA and had passed on information about ‘the movement of military personnel and equipment’ within the fake ‘republic’. .
The OSCE then condemned the fake ‘trial’ and 13-year ‘sentences’ as “nothing but pure political theatre.”
The charges against Vadym Golda, Maksym Petrov and Dmytro Shabanov are absurd, and their ‘trials’ in flagrant violation of Russia’s commitments as a member of the OSCE. It was, however, clear long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that Moscow was getting very annoyed with the OSCE Monitoring Mission’s drones which kept exposing Russia’s movement of military hardware and men to a country it was not openly admitting to being at war with.
Back in 2014, Moscow had seriously limited the scope of human OSCE monitors able to observe what was happening at border crossings between the Russian Federation and Ukraine (into the proxy ‘Luhansk and Donetsk republics’). The name of the resulting mission - the OSCE Observer Mission at Russian Checkpoints Gukovo and [Russian] Donetsk – made it clear just how limited its scope was (details here).
OSCE SMM did, however, have long range UAV, or drones, that kept on recording convoys of trucks crossing the border at night on dirt roads leading to places on the border where there was no formal border crossing. On a number of occasions reported in 2018 and 2019, the footage showed that the vehicles were carrying military hardware.
Such inconvenient drones meant that Russia could not rely solely on darkness and dirt roads. There were several occasions where drones were jammed at around the same time as they detected such convoys, or shot down. On 10 October 2018, for example, a UAV was jammed following the sighting of a Russian Ural truck mount mounting with an anti-aircraft gun near the border. On 27 October, that year, a UAV was first jammed, and then downed, after it began reporting the movement of a Russian convoy of trucks and of a surface-to-air missile system in a non-government controlled part of Donetsk oblast. Russia’s foreign ministry reacted to international outrage over the downing of an international mission’s UAV by claiming that the route of the drone should have “been agreed in advance” with the so-called ‘republics’. That would, indeed, have ‘solved’ the problem since Russia would have been forewarned when not to bring its weapons of death into Ukraine by night.
Such military convoys by night and dirt road continued in 2019 and 2020, even while the proxy ‘republics’ were using the pandemic as an excuse for restricting access to OSCE monitors [details here].
Presumably in preparation for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow began blocking OSCE monitors back in September 2021. Then in April 2022, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission [SMM] was closed after Russia refused to agree to an extension of its mandate. Shortly afterwards (on 30 April 2022), Russian-installed ‘LPR leader’ Leonid Pasechkin actually banned the international organization to which Russia remains a party.