THE HAGUE, February 10. /TASS/. Moscow is prepared to continue cooperation with the Dutch side on the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine and hopes that investigators will establish the real causes of the tragedy, Russian Ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin told TASS.
When asked if international investigators had sought Russia’s assistance in decoding the primary radar data, the diplomat said usually these requests are sent by the Dutch side to the embassy in Moscow that later hands over the documents to the Russian Foreign Ministry.
"I think that this will be so this time," Shulgin stressed. "I only want to note that every time when the Dutch side turned to us, we treated these requests very carefully."
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Last year, a delegation of the Dutch prosecutors visited Moscow and held meetings at a high level, receiving the necessary explanations, he said. "As we understood, after returning to The Hague, the delegation was satisfied by the contacts.
"We are ready now to cooperate openly, we confirm that every time when we have any additional materials, we are ready to hand them over," the ambassador said. "Guided by this logics, we gave to the Dutch side the discovered primary radar data in October last year. This data is valuable as it reflects the real situation at the moment of the incident. Judging from this data, there is no trace of a missile approaching the plane from the territory that was under control of the Donbass militias at that time."
The data was handed over to the team of investigators more than three months ago, "and most recently the Dutch colleagues said that they cannot read it as it was recorded in another format," he said. "We are ready to help them, but the question is whether they should have waited for three or four months to make sure that this is another format," Shulgin said.
"We are ready to work further and hope that the investigation will be comprehensive, unbiased and will help establish the real causes of the tragedy," he stressed.
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 2014. All 298 people aboard the airliner died in the air crash. Most of the air crash’s victims were Dutch nationals.