THE UNITED NATIONS, August 19. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia focused at a media briefing in the UN Security Council on the need to make the probe of the July 17 crash of a Malaysian Boeing airliner in Ukraine international, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin told ITAR-TASS in comments on the results of the UN Security Council meeting which Russia initiated on Monday.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Oscar Fernandez-Taranco did not produce much information in a report at the UN Security Council meeting, Churkin said. “But this was important for us to focus once again on the need to make the investigation international. This seems to us that the UN Secretariat can play its role in this issue. They pledged to supervise it once again,” the diplomat noted.
Now Russia “does not have a quite clear idea,” which role the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) plays in the probe into the aircrash, as UN Security Council Resolution 2166 envisages participation of the organization in the investigation. “As we know, the ICAO stays aside from the investigation which is being conducted,” the Russian ambassador said. The Russian delegation also explained at the UN Security Council meeting that the Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) where Ukraine is a member-state deals with such issues on the post-Soviet space. “We asked to recheck whether it (Kiev) is conducting specific cooperation with MAK into the probe,” the diplomat noted.
At the UN Security Council meeting, Russia also asked why “nothing is known about the record of talks between Ukrainian flight controllers” before the crash of the Malaysian Boeing airplane, Churkin said. In this regard, UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman who will go to Kiev on Wednesday was instructed to learn how Kiev was cooperating with international experts. “The agreement is that he will also ask about this issue. How are Ukrainians making their contribution in this international investigation? First of all, they should produce the records of talks between their flight controllers, so that this would be possible to understand why they directed the Malaysian airplane in the conflict zone,” Churkin said.
The UN Security Council meeting convened on Russia’s initiative was useful and now council’s members will wait for an intermediate report on progress of the air disaster probe that is expected to be presented at the end of this month. British Permanent Representative earlier presiding in the UN Security Council Mark Lyall Grant told reporters that the report on the aircrash investigation would not be confidential.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 airliner from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, crashed in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on July 17, killing all 298 people onboard.
On July 22, the UN Security Council has adopted Resolution 2166 which envisaged an independent probe into the aircrash in line with the basic principles of international civil aviation. The document urged the parties to the conflict in east Ukraine to stop all military actions in the air crash area and to provide full access to the air crash site to experts.