Sure. I'll be totally honest with you, and I don't think anything I'm saying has not been in our, for example, OSCE daily report or weekly thematic reports. One of the difficulties is freedom of access for the monitoring mission. This is happening on both sides of the contact line, the Ukrainian side and the side that's controlled by the rebels, but of course, it's much worse on the rebel side.
As most of you know, the Minsk accords require both sides to, for example, move heavy weaponry away from the contact line. There are prescribed distances that they should be removed to. Then what happens is that these heavy weapons are meant to be stored in monitored storage sites, but many times the special monitoring mission has been prevented from going to these storage sites to see if the weapons are still there. In fact, as we speak, over the past few weeks there's been a gradual escalation of violence and a big reason for that is that the heavy weaponry has been moved back into place and is being used.
The other thing is that there have been lots and lots of difficulties accessing the Ukraine-Russia border under rebel control. Believe it or not, the length of the Ukrainian border under rebel control is almost 500 kilometres. That's more than the distance from here to Toronto. On many occasions the mission has been prevented from going to the border, and this is a problem especially at night because a lot of railway lines cross the contact line and no one really knows what types of materials are taken over.
If I can speak from a personal point of view—maybe that was part of your question—working there is very difficult. As I've said, I've worked in many places around the world and the destruction you see...the psycho-social distrust among many of the children is a huge factor right now. It's very bad. Do you know that some families in Donetsk have spent weeks in underground shelters without seeing any daylight, without breathing any fresh air? There's a town called Shyroka Balka near Mariupol and that has been shelled constantly. There's no one there now, but a lot of the residents spent weeks in a shelter there. It's very difficult.
Finally, I should say that I mentioned MH17, and I've just come back from Malaysia by the way. I was there for the second anniversary. The special monitoring mission was the first international presence on the site of the plane crash, 24 hours after that plane came down. I can tell you that the images we saw were absolutely horrific. We were threatened by armed rebel groups, some of them intoxicated, some of them in very vicious types of states of attitude. Yet day after day we did gain more access and were able to get experts there to deal with the site, but on many occasions we were blocked. We were blocked while we were trying to get Malaysians there, and Dutch investigators. In fact, just quickly to wrap up, the Dutch have been trying to finish off their criminal investigation, but they have been blocked, especially in Luhansk, to do things like, for example, triangulate cellphone tower communications among the rebels.
It's a very difficult operating environment, but I'm glad that Canada is part of the mission to document what is going on and to facilitate access.