VIENNA, November 11 (RIA Novosti) — The Russian envoy at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) on Tuesday condemned the apparent reluctance of Dutch experts to retrieve the wreckage of the crashed Malaysian airliner from the eastern Donetsk region.
Speaking to RIA Novosti, Russia’s Andrei Kelin said he felt that “these experts are only looking for an excuse to do nothing, to leave it as it is and abandon the wreckage.”
Flight MH17 crashed in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk on July 17. All 298 people on board died, most of them Dutch. Debris from the plane strew over several kilometers.
It was announced on Thursday that a group of Dutch experts had begun collecting wreckage from the site, but the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic later called Boeing 777 the “world’s most neglected aircraft”, claiming only one Dutch expert had been at the crash site for days.
Andrei Purgin, who had been sworn in as the republic’s president earlier this month, said the Dutch had requested that the local militia “collect, pack and transport it for them”.
Russia’s OSCE envoy Andrei Kelin said this behavior did not “inspire trust”. “If people want to work they should do it. My understanding is that they don’t want to negotiate with the militia on principle. It looks rather absurd because even Kiev is not against [contacts], and there are all conditions for the Dutch experts to start their work,” Kelin stressed.
Kiev and its Western allies previously accused the self-defense forces in eastern Ukraine of downing the Malaysian airliner with a medium-range missile after a preliminary report by the Dutch Safety Board indicated that the plane could have broken up in midair due to structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated it from the outside.
