"The unceremonious behaviour of the prosecutors was noticeable as they were openly pushing the hearing ahead and demanding that the court simply approve as soon as possible the suggested sole version of events", Maria Zakharova said.
The statement comes after a representative of a district court in the Hague said that since the Dutch court is not obligated to translate all the materials related to the MH17 crash case — with the case file consisting of 36,000 pages — the Russian defendant may be left without the possibility to study all the documents.
The hearings began at the Schiphol Judicial Complex on 9-10 March and will continue on 23 March. Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko are the defendants. Pulatov is represented by an international group, uniting two Dutch lawyers and one Russian lawyer, while the others are tried in absentia.
MH17, a Malaysian Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 298 people on board, was shot down on 17 July 2014 in eastern Ukraine, leaving no survivors. Most of the deceased were Dutch citizens. The authorities in Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics in southeastern Ukraine have blamed each other for the downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight. The US, the UK, and Australia have supported Kiev’s accusations and claimed that the airliner was shot down by a surface-to-air missile from a territory controlled by self-defence forces from the self-proclaimed republics that allegedly received the weapons from Russia.
Following the deadly crash, the US, the EU imposed sanctions against Russia, which they claimed could be responsible for the tragedy.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has strongly refuted the conclusions as groundless and called the investigation "biased".
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has said that JIT’s findings regarding the MH17 in eastern Ukraine were politically motivated and not supported by evidence. He also stated that Russia has been blamed for the incident since the very beginning of the investigation.
