MOSCOW, October 13. /TASS/. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov has described calls addressed to Russia for assisting the search for those responsible for the loss of MH17 flight over Donbass as inappropriate.
A statement issued on Tuesday following the EU-Ukraine summit contained a call addressed to Russia to "accept its responsibility and to cooperate fully with all efforts to establish accountability on the downing of flight MH17."
"For the time being I have had no chance to study it. But such calls are absolutely inappropriate and impermissible, because this tragedy occurred in the sky over the territory of Ukraine," Peskov told the media.
He recalled there had been "no verdicts" on whether Russia might have been involved in the tragedy and asked everybody to "react to the news as it comes."
Earlier, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the Netherlands’ recommendations for completing an additional investigation into the loss of flight MH17 over Donbass indicated the Hague’s intention to shift the emphasis from Kiev to Moscow in this affair.
A passenger Boeing-777 of Malaysia Airlines (flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur) was downed over Ukraine’s Donetsk Region on July 17, 2014. All 298 people on board - citizens of ten countries - died in the disaster. Although hostilities were underway on the ground at the time, Kiev failed to close the airspace over Donbass to international passenger flights. Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine created a Joint Investigation Team to probe into the incident.