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Russia ready to share all info required by MH17 crash investigators as Netherlands now seeks Moscow's help
Moscow is poised to give assistance in the investigation of 2014 MH17 flight crash, as it always was, a Russian EU envoy assured, responding to a call for cooperation by the Dutch Foreign Minister.
"We are ready to cooperate in clarifying all the circumstances of the incident," Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's envoy to the European Union, told the media on Monday. In fact, Moscow has always been poised to do so, but its proposals were brushed aside, the diplomat recalled.
Moscow is also prepared to hand over "the data we have" to the Dutch counterparts ahead of a court trial that will look at the evidence collected by the Netherlands-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) in March next year, Chizhov said.
The envoy spoke shortly after Stef Blok, the Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, said Russia's contribution is needed to find some missing facts about the crash that killed 298 passengers and crew. The Hague had "asked the Russian Federation to cooperate in a factual investigation into the closing of airspace above and around Ukraine," Blok wrote to Dutch lawmakers on Sunday.
Blok's letter comes two months after Chris van Dam, spokesman for the MH17 probe, announced the inquiry will focus on why Ukraine's airspace "was not closed" over Donetsk at the time when intense hostilities have been taking place between the government military and rebel forces in the breakaway Donbass region.
Back in 2015, a report released by the Dutch Safety Board confirmed that while it was hard to find out who was behind the MH17 downing, the airspace over Ukraine should have been closed. Meanwhile, lawyers representing some victims of the MH17 crash maintain that it was Ukraine's responsibility to ensure safety of civilian air traffic during the fighting.
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Bound for Kuala Lumpur, the MH17 was flying over Eastern Ukraine when it was downed on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board. A subsequent Dutch-led probe into the tragedy has been heavily criticized for its bias and inclination to blame Russia even before all the facts are established.
Moscow has consistently said that – despite not being included into the investigation team – it is still open to cooperation. Russia has already provided radar records, declassified military data on a missile thought to have downed the plane, and files proving that the projectile which downed the plane had been in Ukraine since the 1980s – but the data has been persistently rejected as the probe went on.
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