Work Underway To Set Date Of New Russian-Dutch-Australian MH17 Consultations - Moscow

Work Underway to Set Date of New Russian-Dutch-Australian MH17 Consultations - Moscow

Effort is being made to set the date of the next round of Russian-Dutch-Australian consultations on the 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Aleksey Paramonov, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's First European Department, said in an interview with Sputnik

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th October, 2019) Effort is being made to set the date of the next round of Russian-Dutch-Australian consultations on the 2014 crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Aleksey Paramonov, the director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's First European Department, said in an interview with Sputnik.

The first round of the trilateral consultations was held in late March.

"Despite the difficult situation around establishing the reasons behind the MH17 crash and identifying those guilty, given that there are only accusations but no real cooperation, we remain open for dialogue, which could at least promote getting over the impasse in the process of establishing the truth. Therefore, we have given consent for holding trilateral consultations between Russia, the Netherlands and Australia on the whole range of questions related to the flight MH17 crash. Several meetings have already been held. We're working on the time frame for the next ones," Paramonov said.

He stressed that the countries had agreed to keep the consultations confidential.

Flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. All 298 people on board were killed. Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine's easternmost region have exchanged blame for the downing of the plane.

The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team has concluded that the plane was brought down by a missile that came from the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces, based near Russia's Kursk. The Russian Foreign Ministry has refuted the conclusions as groundless and called the investigation biased.