Pro-Kremlin rebels in eastern Ukraine today released four European monitors after being pressed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet the terms of a tenuous truce with Kiev.
Both Ukraine and its Western allies have been seeking concrete steps from Russia to back up the ceasefire Kiev extended with the militias yesterday in the hope of calming a deadly insurgency sparked by the country's new westward course.
And the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said it had learned that a second team of its unarmed observers had just been released by gunmen in the separatist rustbelt region of Lugansk.
"Our Lugansk-based team of 4 monitors have been released after 1 month in captivity," the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine said on its Facebook page.
Two groups of unarmed observers from the Vienna-based European security organisation totalling eight international monitors and a Ukrainian translator were detained at roadblocks three days apart in late May.
Rebel commanders on Thursday presented the group had detained on May 26 in the Donetsk region to the press without specifying who had abducted them or why.
But the second team the disappeared in the neighbouring Lugansk province on May 29 appeared to have been nabbed by a different militia and negotiations for their freedom intensified in the recent days.
The OSCE, a 57-nation group created in the 1970s to oversee European security during the Cold War has played a central role in trying to mediate an end to a 12-week insurgency convulsing the ex-Soviet state.
It has helped broker talks between Moscow and Kiev as well as indirect contacts between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's representative and the heads of the self-proclaimed "People's Republics" of Donetsk and Lugansk.
