MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/. The final report on the probe into the MH17 crash in east Ukraine last year caused a lot a questions that stll require answers, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Wednesday.
"As for the Boeing, we’ll study the report, which was released yesterday. Already now, we have a lot of questions. Actually, we had questions from the very beginning. And there are no answers to them," Lavrov said during the government’s question time in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament.
"We always respect someone else’s opinion but we want to do this on the basis of reciprocity," Lavrov said.
"However, our opinion was not respected or specially requested. We literally requested that Almaz-Antey, the manufacturer of a missile, which, as they assert, shot down the airliner, should participate in the broadest possible way in all experiments and answer all the questions and give reference data. But nothing of this kind happened," the Russian foreign minister said.
The countries that took part in the probe should respect the UN Security Council, which adopted a resolution in July 2014 urging an objective and unbiased investigation of the MH17 air crash, Lavrov said.
"International standards required the involvement of ICAO [the International Civil Aviation Organization] but not on a folding seat as was the case but in a full-fledged format. However, this was not done. There was also a requirement that the Security Council should be regularly informed about progress in the probe. This was not done either. We proposed sending a Security Council mission to the crash site but our Western partners also gave this up," the Russian foreign minister said.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 passenger airliner on a flight from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur crashed in the area of hostilities between local militias and Ukrainian governmental troops in east Ukraine’s Donetsk region in July last year. All 298 people aboard the airliner died in the air crash.
- MH17 hit by missile Ukraine launched from militia-controlled region — Dutch Safety Board
- Russia continues to investigate MH17 crash despite Dutch Safety Board report
- Russia asks ICAO to interfere with MH17 crash probe — aviation agency
- Moscow urges ICAO not to manipulate facts
- Moscow says Dutch PM’s call to cooperate on MH17 crash investigation ‘strange’
Most of the air crash’s victims were Dutch nationals.
The main version put forward was that the airliner was hit by a surface-to-air missile.
The Ukrainian authorities and the militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic accused each other of the airliner crash.
The UN Security Council resolved on July 21 to hold a comprehensive and independent probe.
Russia’s representatives have said on many occasions they are dissatisfied with how the investigation is being carried out and that the data presented by the Russian side are ignored.
The Dutch Security Council published a final report on Tuesday on the causes of the MH17 crash while the Russian antiaircraft missile system manufacturer Almaz-Antey presented the conclusions of its own investigation confirmed by full-scale experiments.
Almaz-Antey specialists confirmed during their experiments that the Boeing had been hit by a Buk air defense missile system from the area of the Zaroshchenskoye community controlled by the Ukrainian military on the day of the air disaster as reports said.
Almaz-Antey experts also concluded that an older missile modification, namely, the 9M38 missile, had been fired. The manufacture of these missiles stopped in 1986. These missiles were withdrawn from service in Russia.