MOSCOW, September 10 (RIA Novosti) – The Kiev government bears “full responsibility” for the crash of Malaysian Boeing in Ukraine, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday.
“The disaster took place in the airspace of Ukraine, which bears full responsibility for what had happened,” he told his Malaysian counterpart Hishammuddin Tun Hussein.
The tragedy would have never happened had Ukraine opted to solve its internal problems through peaceful means, Shoigu added.
“If Ukraine solved its internal problems without the military involvement, without last month’s bloodshed, without heavy artillery weaponry, including rockets, without aviation – helicopters, attack aircraft, fighter jets – I am sure that this tragedy would not have happened,” the Russian minister stressed.
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed on July 17 in Donetsk Region, killing all 298 people on board.
According to a preliminary crash report issued on Tuesday, the plane broke into pieces mid-flight after being hit by “a large number of high-energy objects.”
The Ukrainian government claims that independence supporters in the country’s eastern regions shot the plane down but it has not provided any evidence to support those claims. Local militia leaders insist that they do not have weapons capable of shooting the MH17 aircraft down.
The Russian Defense Ministry said that an Ukrainian combat jet was detected in close approach to the MH17 shortly before it crashed. The presence of the Ukrainian Su-25 ground attack aircraft can be confirmed by video shots made by the Rostov monitoring center. In addition, MH17 crashed within the operating zone of the Ukrainian army’s self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air Buk missile systems, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
