The notorious US-made HIMARS MLRS hit a detention center in Yelenovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic on July 29th,2022, where Ukrainian military detainees, including Azov fighters, were being held.
50 Ukrainian POWs were killed and 73 wounded. In addition, 8 detention center employees were injured to varying degrees of severity.
Moscow blamed Ukrainian forces for the attack. kyiv denied the accusations, saying that Russian troops provoked the attack to blame Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry then asked the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross to launch an impartial investigation into the incident.
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But the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has decided to dissolve the mission that was supposed to investigate the attack on the detention center for Ukrainian prisoners of war in Donbass last July due to a lack of security guarantees, his spokesman, Stéphane, said on Thursday.
During a press conference, the spokesperson explained that the decision was made “in the absence of the necessary conditions to deploy the mission in place.”
In this regard, he specified that “for a […] dangerous mission in what is an active war zone”, “clear guarantees of security and access by both parties” are required.
Dujarric did not go into detail about the concrete guarantees that were missing. He also dodged a question about which of the two parties did not provide such guarantees.
Asked why the UN decided to scrap the mission rather than postpone it, the spokesman replied that potential participants cannot be kept “on hold” for months.
“We clearly understood that we had to dissolve it and let people go back to their daily work,” he said.
At the same time, the secretary general is willing to “reconstitute the mission extremely quickly, if guarantees are given,” Dujarric remarked. At the moment, neither kyiv nor Moscow have commented on it.
