Lawyer Allowed to Illegally Detained UN Representative

A lawyer was allowed to Yuriy Suprun, a UN representative who is illegally detained at Donbas.

This was written on the Facebook page of Iryna Gerashchenko, the President’s Commissioner for a peaceful settlement in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Vice-Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada.

“During a humanitarian subgroup session in Minsk, we finally got the answer to our repeated inquiries about the fate of UN representative Yuriy Suprun. He was detained and suspected of ‘war crimes’, it is unclear when, because he was working in international humanitarian organizations for the last two years,” she writes.

According to Gerashchenko, representatives of the illegally occupied territories publicly called Suprun a criminal during a tripartite meeting of the contact group, even though a person can only be recognized as a criminal by a legitimate court of law.

“Now these representatives are backing down, saying it is only ‘under investigation’. After pressure from us, Yuriy was finally allowed to see a lawyer. We are in Minsk, demanding the immediate release of the officially recognized UN representative, and we expect all international humanitarian organizations to also take a public position on this issue”, said Gerashchenko.

In April, the UN announced that its employee was detained by militants in Donbas.

The militants, for their part, said that, on April 8, in Donetsk, they detained a Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) colonel who was also a UN mission representative.

The SBU reported that Suprun was dismissed from the organization in 2014.

DNR militants later spoke of “condemning” of Yuriy Suprun for war crimes.