UNITED NATIONS, July 31. /TASS/. The United Nations Security Council should not address such criminal cases as the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine, Russia’s Permanent Representative at the United Nation Vitaly Churkin said on Friday.
He said special mechanisms could be established outside the United Nations Security Council to carry out legal proceedings on the incident. "I think the Security Council is not a place to discuss various theories of the MH17 crash," he said in a statement posted on the website of the Russian permanent mission to the United Nations. "There are corresponding mechanisms for further legal proceedings or such mechanisms can be established without the United Nations Security Council’s participation, since the Security Council must not deal with criminal cases."
On Wednesday, Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution on the establishment of a criminal tribunal to persecute those responsible for the MH17 crash. The resolution won support from 11 member countries of the Security Council. Angola, Venezuela and China abstained.
Churkin said on Wednesday explaining for Moscow's decision to veto the document that this draft resolution was devoid of any legal or case basis. In his words, the authors of the resolution had preferred political and propaganda consideration to practical tasks. The incident with MH17 cannot be qualified as a threat to international peace and security, he said adding that the shooting down of a Russian Tupolev-154 jet by a Ukrainian naval missile over the Black Sea in the autumn of 2001 did not entail the setting up of any tribunals.
The Boeing 777-200 of the Malaysia Airlines (MH17) en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17 in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 km (over 37 miles) from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk self-defense forces and the Ukrainian army. All the passengers and crewmembers onboard the aircraft - 298 people, citizens of 10 states - died. Most of the passengers - 196 people - were Dutch citizens. According to the key theory of the crash, the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air or an air-to-air missile. The Ukrainian authorities and representatives of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Lugansk have been accusing each other of the crash. The United Nations Security Council on July 21, 2014 demanded a comprehensive and independent investigation. Russia’s foreign ministry has repeatedly said Russia was not satisfied with how the investigation was being conducted.