Former international mission worker is convicted of spying in Russian-held Donetsk

Russian officials say a former staff member of an international monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine has been convicted of spying by a court in the Moscow-occupied Donetsk. Vadym Golda — who was a security assistant for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s monitoring mission — was sentenced to 16 years in prison for his alleged crime which involved gathering information about industrial facilities, the Russian prosecutor general’s office said Friday.  Some of the facilities came under attack in the war. The OSCE special monitoring mission was deployed in 2014 to provide security in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions after the start of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.