Jul 17. () –
The Russian Embassy in the Netherlands on Wednesday criticised the “high degree of politicisation” that has prevented a credible investigation into the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014 as it flew over an occupied area in the Donetsk region from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
Ten years after the incident, Moscow has complained that “complete, exhaustive and independent international investigations” have not been carried out, meaning that “the true circumstances of the tragedy have still not been established,” according to a statement published by the Russian embassy in the Netherlands.
Moscow has insisted that the Dutch-led investigation not only failed to meet the criteria of UN Security Council Resolution 2166, but also failed to take into account “the huge volume of data submitted by Russia,” which was denied participation.
The joint international investigation team involved in the case also included Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine as “politically committed against Russia.”
“The criteria initially established by the Netherlands and its allies for the above-mentioned investigations did not meet even the minimum requirements of objectivity. As a result, the conclusions contain a significant number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies, while many questions directly related to the circumstances of the disaster remain open,” the Embassy said.
“We have no doubt that the Netherlands, Australia and the countries that have joined them, driven by political considerations, are trying in every way to impose their pre-selected version of the accident on the world community (…) Given the initial openly anti-Russian sentiment of the participants, there is no doubt about the final results,” which “will have nothing to do with the truth,” he said.
Russia has expressed surprise at the lack of questions from Ukraine over the years, a country that, it stressed, “refused to provide radar data and recordings of conversations with flight tracking services,” as well as at the “disappearance” of the air traffic controllers who worked that day.
“The question of kyiv’s responsibility for not closing the airspace over the zone of hostilities, where the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ air defence systems were deployed, was also not properly considered,” the Russian Embassy said.
“The Dutch authorities are stubbornly avoiding discussing this issue,” he said, even though these issues have been raised several times in parliament over the past few years. “Ten years after the tragedy in the skies over Donbas (…) The Hague has been systematically protecting the authorities in kyiv,” he said.
Moscow concluded its statement by stressing that Russia had nothing to do with the accident. “All statements to the contrary are false,” it stressed, but not before expressing its condolences to the victims and its commitment to clarifying the truth.
In mid-November 2022, a court in The Hague sentenced Russian citizens Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinski, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko – who are in Russia – to life imprisonment ‘in absentia’ for the murder of the 298 people on board Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014.
The court confirmed that the plane was hit by a Russian-made missile launched from a territory in Pervomaisk, a Russian-controlled area of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
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