MOSCOW, November 21. /TASS/. Moscow has suggested that Malaysia send its experts to look into Russia’s data on the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said following a meeting with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah on Thursday.
"Today, we have discussed what Russia did to ensure an impartial and thorough investigation into the crash, including the information that we provided and field demonstrations concerning how it all could have happened and what conclusions may could be drawn," Lavrov pointed out. "We provided it all to the Joint Investigation Team but as far as I understand, Malaysia was not informed about the data we had presented. This is why we have invited our Malaysian friends to send their experts so that our experts can tell them what information they had submitted to the Joint Investigative Team in the Netherlands," he added.
According to Lavrov, Saifuddin Abdullah noted that Malaysia had been invited to join the Joint Investigative Team in late 2014, several months after the tragedy. "As far as we know, before Malaysia was invited to join the team, other members had made a decision that any information would be made public only if all of them, including Ukraine, agreed on that," the Russian foreign minister noted.
He emphasized that there was no need to go to great lengths to provide the world with facts about the MH17 crash. "Some phone records were published a while ago, but it had taken five years to make them. However, it won’t take much effort to present the long existing facts to the world," Lavrov stressed. "It includes, the records of conversations with Ukrainian air traffic controllers, data from Ukrainian radars that Kiev is reluctant to provide saying that those radars went out of service right before the crash, and, certainly, satellite data that the United States had vowed to present," Lavrov said.
MH17 crash
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing-777 passenger plane travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk on July 17, 2014. The crash killed all the 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers. There were nationals of ten states among the dead.
The Joint Investigation Team comprises representatives of the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.
On May 24, 2018, the team gave an update of the state of affairs in the criminal investigation, claiming that "the BUK-TELAR that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade (hereinafter 53rd brigade), a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation."
Russia’s Defense Ministry rejected all allegations and said that none of the missile systems belonging to the Russian Armed Forces had ever been taken abroad. The missile, which downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, had been made in the town of Dolgoprudny outside Moscow in 1986, delivered to a military unit deployed to Ukraine and never brought back to Russia, Chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Missile and Artillery Department Lieutenant General Nikolai Parshin said at a briefing.
On June 19, 2019, the Joint Investigation Team announced that it had identified four suspects involved in the crash (three Russian nationals and one Ukrainian), adding that a trial was expected to begin on March 9, 2020.