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Russian missile maker seeks EU compensation for sanctions, field experiment

Russia's Almaz-Antey will include the expenses for carrying out a full-scale field experiment to determine the causes of the MH17 crash in Ukraine into the lawsuit filed earlier to an EU court

MOSCOW, October 16. /TASS/. Russian antiaircraft missile system manufacturer Almaz-Antey has said it will seek compensation from the EU for the losses it sustained from sanctions and expenses for carrying out a full-scale field experiment to determine the causes of the MH17 crash in Ukraine.

Almaz-Antey will include the sum into the lawsuit filed earlier to an EU general court in Luxembourg on lifting the sanctions slapped against the Russian defense manufacturer in late May. Almaz-Antey insists its inclusion in the sanctions list was unfounded.

"As a result of the international sanctions, the Almaz-Antey Concern has sustained financial losses and also the concern’s business reputation was put into question," the company’s director general, Yan Novikov, told the Izvestia newspaper on Friday.

"We believe this is a sufficient reason to confirm by the results of the field experiment the theoretic considerations of our experts aimed at proving the noninvolvement of the concern to the tragedy in Ukraine’s southeast," Novikov said.

The field experiment cost some $160,000, Novikov said. The concern carried out the experiment using only its own funds.

Almaz-Antey presented on Tuesday the results of its experiments held as part of its own probe into the MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine last year. Almaz-Antey specialists have come to the conclusion that the Malaysian airliner was shot down in the summer of 2014 by a missile of the older 9M38 modification whose manufacture stopped in 1986.

Almaz-Antey also confirmed the version that the fatal missile had been launched from the Zaroshchenskoye community controlled by the Ukrainian military and rejected the international commission’s version of the missile’s launch from Snezhnoye, a town that had been under militia’s control at that time.