SYDNEY, May 27. /TASS/. Moscow is ready to provide assistance in investigating flight MH17 crash in Ukraine in 2014, but is not planning to accept the unfounded accusations against it, Russian Ambassador to Australia Grigory Logvinov said on Sunday.
The envoy commented on the decision of the governments of Australia and the Netherlands on Friday to officially accuse Russia of its alleged involvement in the tragedy and hold Moscow responsible.
"Australia’s authorities, represented by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, have unequivocally supported dubious conclusions of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) and moreover demanded that Russia repent and agree on the compensation sum for the victims of flight MH17 crash," the ambassador said.
Despite Russia’s proposals to jointly conduct a serious and professional investigation, all of them have been rejected, the envoy said. "Dirty provocations are staged, and the party to blame is defined beforehand. The so-called investigation is carried out almost only on the basis of information from social networks and some international NGOs, which have disgraced themselves by fabrications, primitive frame-ups and so on," the diplomat said.
Canberra ignores all serious data refuting the fake news, Logvinov noted. "The same malign pattern is seen in the so-called Skripal case, the Syria "chemic dossier" and earlier in fabricating the pretexts for a military attack on Yugoslavia and Iraq."
On Thursday, the Joint Investigation Team, consisting of representatives of Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine, released its update in criminal investigation of flight MH17 crash. According to the JIT, "the BUK-TELAR that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade (hereinafter 53rd brigade), a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation."
Russia’s Defense Ministry rejected all the accusations saying that none of the Russian Army’s air defense missile systems had ever crossed the border between Russia and Ukraine. The ministry also said that Russia provided the Dutch investigators with overwhelming evidence clearly pointing to the complicity of Ukrainian crews of Buk missile systems in destroying the Boeing airliner.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the JIT’s investigation reminds of the situation with the case of the poisoning of former Russian military intelligence (GRU) Colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia by its lack of evidence.
The Boeing-777 passenger plane operated by Malaysian Airlines crashed on July 17, 2014, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in the east of the Donetsk region. As many as 283 passengers and 15 crew members - citizens of 10 states, were killed in the crash. The parties to the armed conflict in Donbass accused each other of complicity in the tragedy.