MOSCOW, Nov. 17 Moscow regrets that The Hague court neglected principles of impartial justice in favor of the political situation, the MH17 proceedings were based on a political order directed against the Russian Federation, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
«Both the course and the results of the proceedings indicate that it was based on a political order to reinforce the version promoted by The Hague and its associates in the joint investigation team about Russia's involvement in the tragedy,» the statement says.
The agency noted that the Russian Federation is not a party to this process, despite this, the Dutch prosecutor's office did its best to present the case differently. facts to him. As we can see, the Dutch Themis coped with its task,» the agency noted.
The Russian Foreign Ministry emphasized that throughout the entire process, the court was under unprecedented pressure from Dutch politicians, representatives of the prosecutor's office and the media, who imposed a politically motivated outcome of the proceedings, noting that objectivity and impartiality in such conditions are out of the question.
«We deeply regret that the District Court of The Hague has neglected the principles of impartial justice in favor of the current political situation, thereby causing a serious reputational blow to the entire Dutch judicial system,» the ministry added.
On Thursday, a court found Russians Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko guilty of shooting down flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and killing 298 of its passengers and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment. At the same time, the District Court of The Hague found the fourth accused Russian Oleg Pulatov not guilty and rejected the prosecutor's office's demand to place him in prison. Pulatov was exempted from liability for claims for compensation. The rest, as decided by the Dutch court, will have to pay the families of the victims a total of 16 million euros.
The court did not directly link the use of the Buk air defense system against flight MH17 during sentencing to Russia, although it expressed the opinion that Russia had control over the DPR at the time.
The first deputy head of the international committee of the Federation Council, Vladimir Dzhabarov, said that the decision of the Hague court on MH17 was expected, legally insignificant for the Russian Federation, and Oleg Morozov, a member of the State Duma from United Russia, expressed the opinion that the court is biased and all this is an «information provocation». In turn, the head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky, said that it was impossible to agree with this politicized decision. He noted that Russian specialists were not allowed to work with the joint investigation team, and the prosecution did not provide any weighty evidence.
The trial for the downing of flight MH17 began in the Netherlands on March 9, 2020. The prosecutor's office demanded that all four defendants be sentenced to life imprisonment.
Malaysian Boeing, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur 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 transfer satellite images to the investigation, where, how they they say that the moment of rocket launch is visible.
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 was based on the testimony of exclusively anonymous witnesses. The defense of the Russian accused in the case, Pulatov, stated that this made it difficult to assess the reliability of their testimony, but the Dutch prosecutor's office insisted that anonymity was necessary for security reasons. and cause regret, and the investigation is biased and one-sided. According to the head of department Sergey Lavrov, it is full of double standards.
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Crash of Malaysian Boeing in Ukraine: where rocket launchedInfographicView