MOSCOW, October 12. /TASS/. Recommendations of the Netherlands to end work on an additional probe into the MH17 flight crash in Donbass in 2014 shows The Hague’s trying to shift the spotlight from Kiev to Moscow in this case, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a commentary on Tuesday.
The commentary followed media reports about the intentions of the Dutch Foreign Ministry to end work on an additional probe into the situation when the airspace was not closed over the zone of an armed conflict in Donbass, resulting in the crash of a Malaysian Boeing airliner.
"Surprisingly, the Kingdom’s Foreign Ministry regarded work on that track inexpedient," she pointed out. "In its essence, this demarche is yet another confirmation that the official The Hague ignores things that are manifest and is only concerned about how to deflect blame from Kiev onto Moscow and shelter the Ukrainian authorities from any responsibility," she added.
"This move does not help to establish the truth, but leads to further politicization of the situation around the investigation into the MH17 flight crash by the Joint Investigation Team. "In this regard, we still cannot expect any impartiality or objectivity of the investigation," she stressed.
A passenger Boeing-777 plane of Malaysia Airlines (flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur) was shot down over the Donetsk Region of Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing 298 people on board - citizens of ten states. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) in June 2019 said it had identified a group of four suspects involved in the incident. Former chief of the Donetsk People's Republic's militia, Igor Girkin (Strelkov) and his subordinates: Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Leonid Kharchenko. Their trial began in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020. The four are accused of allegedly delivering a BUK anti-aircraft missile system to Ukraine from Russia. Russian officials have repeatedly expressed distrust towards the JIT's conclusions, which carried out a criminal investigation of the MH17 case and pointed to the groundlessness of the arguments presented by the prosecution and the reluctance to use Moscow's conclusions in conducting the investigation.