Moscow, Sep 10 (IANS/ITAR-TASS): Ukraine bears full responsibility for the tragedy of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in the eastern region of that country earlier this year, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday.
The Boeing 777-200 of the Malaysia Airlines en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed July 17 in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Region, some 60 km from the Russian border, in the zone of combat operations between the Donetsk self-defence forces and the Ukrainian army.
All 298 passengers and crew on board the aircraft.
“The accident took place in the airspace of Ukraine, which is fully responsible for it,” Shoigu said at a meeting in Moscow with his Malaysian counterpart Hishammuddin Hussein.
The Russian minister added that the tragedy with the Malaysian airliner could have been avoided if Ukraine had resolved its issues without military involvement.
The top Russian military official also said that Ukraine failed to answer all questions from the Russian defence ministry concerning the Boeing crash.
“We came up with 10 simple questions, answers to which could have shed some light on the accident,” Shoigu said. “Unfortunately, we have not yet received even a single answer to them.”
Shoigu told Hussein that the Russian defence ministry was ready to assist Malaysia in the investigation of the airliner’s crash.
"We are ready to give all the necessary assistance and support to investigate the causes of the crash," Shoigu said.
The Russian minister once again expressed his deep condolences to all people in Malaysia over the death of people in the crash and personally to Hussein, who lost relatives in the tragic incident.
The Dutch Safety Board, which is leading the investigation and coordinating the international team of investigators, said in its preliminary report published Tuesday that “Flight MH17 with a Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines broke up in the air probably as a result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside”.
International experts from the Netherlands, Australia and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) began arriving at the airliner crash site near the settlement of Gabovo, 79 km north of Donetsk, since July 31 in search of the missing bodies of passengers and the aircraft’s wreckage.
Before that, they had not been able to carry out their search operation for a week over incessant fighting between the local self-defence militia and pro-Kiev troops.
The search resumed after the warring sides agreed on a ceasefire around the airliner wreckage area and on a security corridor for the arrival of experts and their work at the crash site.