A local staffer for European monitors observing Ukraine's flaring separatist conflict was returned today, a day after going missing in the country's pro-Russian east.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said a member of its Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) did not return from a planned vacation yesterday and was reportedly being held in the insurgents' de facto capital of Donetsk.
The employee was returned only this evening, after being gone for about a day, and after the OSCE mission demanded his "immediate and unconditional release."
"The SMM staff member who went missing on 7 June was returned today to the mission in Donetsk," the mission said on its Facebook page.
A mission spokeswoman contacted by AFP declined to give immediate details on the matter.
A source told AFP on condition of anonymity that the missing Ukrainian was a driver who lived in the neighbouring pro-Russian region of Lugansk.
The Donetsk rebels' human rights representative called the OSCE's report "a fake".
"We did not detain anyone," Darya Morozova told AFP by phone. "We are not holding any OSCE staff."
The incident is the latest in a string of cases of OSCE and other foreign monitors going missing in the war-scarred industrial southeast of the former Soviet state.
Pro-Russian fighters usually release their captives after protracted negotiations that can take weeks or even months.
But the United Nations' human rights representative Ivan Simonovic said last week that he still had no information about the fate of a staff member reported captured in Donetsk on April 13.
Ukraine's 26-month war has claimed the lives of nearly 9,400 people and recently the violence has returned to levels not witnessed since the signing of a December 2015 truce.
Kiev and its Western allies accuse Russia of plotting and directly supporting the rebellion in the east, in retaliation for Ukraine's February 2014 ouster of its Moscow-backed leadership.
