MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th November, 2022) Russia regrets that the Hague District Court disregarded the principles of impartial justice for the sake of the current political environment, targeting Moscow during its MH17 crash proceedings, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.
The Hague District Court said earlier on Thursday that it had found Russian citizens Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko guilty of the MH17 plane crash in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and of killing 298 of its passengers. It also ruled that the Buk missile that downed the place was fired from an area controlled by the Donetsk People's Republic and not Ukraine at the time of the incident.
"We deeply regret that the Hague District Court neglected the principles of impartial justice for the sake of the current political environment," the ministry said in a statement.
Moscow suggested that through these actions, the court has damaged the reputation of the entire Dutch judicial system.
"Both the course and the results of the proceedings indicate that it was based on a political order for corroborating the version, promoted by the Hague and its associates in the joint investigation team, about Russia's involvement in the tragedy," the statement read.
The Russian Foreign Ministry recalled that Moscow was not a party in the case, though the Dutch prosecutor's office tried to present the matter differently.
"The court was assigned the role of an extra, tasked with fitting the evidence base to the guilty verdict and ignoring facts contradicting it. As we can see, the Dutch Themis (Greek goddess of justice) managed this task well," the statement added.
According to Moscow, the court was unprecedentedly pressured by Dutch politicians, representatives of the prosecutor's office and media throughout the entire process. They imposed a politically motivated outcome of the proceedings on the judicial body. The case has nothing to do with objectivity and impartiality, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The trial in the Netherlands has every chance of becoming one of the most scandalous in the history of legal proceedings with its "extensive list of oddities, inconsistencies and dubious arguments of the prosecution," the ministry concluded.
Alexander Brod, a member of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, also said that the Hague court's verdict did not inspire confidence, since there were too many "dark spots" in the investigation, and the lack of transparency aroused suspicions of political bias.
The MH17 passenger flight from Amsterdam to Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur crashed in the Donbas conflict zone on July 17, 2014. All 298 passengers and crew members on board were killed.
The Dutch-led international Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which does not include Russia, suggested that the aircraft was shot by a Russian-made Buk missile originating from a military brigade stationed in the Russian city of Kursk. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the JIT allegations of Russia's links to the crash were groundless, adding that the investigation was biased and one-sided.
Meanwhile, Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolay Vinnichenko told Sputnik that Moscow handed over to the Netherlands not only radar data, but also documentation proving that the Buk missile belonged to Ukraine and was launched from the Kiev-controlled territory. However, investigators ignored this information, according to Vinnichenko.
