MOSCOW, Nov. 17 Russia will study the verdict of the District Court of The Hague on MH17, Ivan Nechaev, deputy director of the information and press department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said.
«I can say at the moment that we will study this decision, because in all these issues every nuance matters, therefore, after studying this legal document, we will, we are probably ready to comment on this somehow,» Nechaev said at a briefing.
On Thursday, a meeting of the District Court of The Hague began at the Schiphol Judicial Complex, during which the verdict on the case of the crash of the Malaysian Boeing (flight MH17) will be read out. in 2014 in the east of Ukraine.
The trial began on Thursday afternoon at the highly secured Schiphol court complex near Amsterdam, which the District Court of The Hague has specifically reserved for hearings in the plane crash case. The presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis will announce the verdict for the four defendants — Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.
In the courtroom, in addition to judges and prosecutors, there is the defense of the accused Russian Oleg Pulatov — Dutch lawyers Sabine ten Dusshate and Boudewijn van Eyck, as well as relatives of the victims, their legal advisers and journalists from different countries. Pulatov himself and the other defendants are not present at the sentencing, as they were at all previous hearings.
The Dutch prosecutor's office demands that all four defendants be sentenced to life imprisonment «for the destruction of an aircraft as part of an organized group, which led to the death of 298 people , and the killing of the passengers on board».
The trial in the case of the crash of flight MH17 began in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020.
A Malaysian Boeing flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014 near Donetsk. There were 298 people on board, all of them died. Kyiv immediately blamed the militias for the plane crash, but they said that they did not have the means to shoot down the plane at such a height.
Ukraine refused to provide data from its radars, and the United States did not provide the investigation with satellite images, which, they claim, show the moment of the rocket launch. » />14:13Infographics
Malaysian Boeing crash in Ukraine: where the rocket was launched from InfographicsView
As Deputy Prosecutor General of Russia Nikolai Vinnichenko stated, the Russian side handed over to the Netherlands not only data from Russian radars, but also documentation indicating that the Buk air defense missile system that hit the Boeing belonged to Ukraine, and it was launched from territory controlled by Kyiv, but investigators ignored.
At the same time, on the first day of the court hearing, the prosecution admitted that it had received and was studying the data of the Russian prosecutor's office. The investigation was conducted by a joint investigation team (JIT) under the leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Netherlands without the participation of Russia. The investigation claims that the Boeing was shot down from the Buk anti-aircraft missile system, which belonged to the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade of the RF Armed Forces from Kursk, from the territory controlled by the militia.
The line of state prosecution is based on the testimony of exclusively anonymous witnesses. The defense of the Russian accused in the case, Pulatov, stated that this makes it difficult to assess the reliability of their testimony, but the Dutch prosecutor's office insists that anonymity is necessary for security reasons. and the investigation is biased and one-sided. According to the head of the department, Sergei Lavrov, it is full of double standards.