The Dutch prosecutor's office is demanding life imprisonment for all four defendants (Russian citizens Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Oleg Pulatov, as well as Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko) in the case of the MH17 plane crash, prosecutor Manon Ridderbeks said on Wednesday.
He also asked that the court issue an arrest warrant for all of the defendants.
Earlier in the day, prosecutor Thijs Berger said that they all deserve long-term punishment for destroying the plane and killing 298 passengers.
Commenting on the trial, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the court is making attempts to put responsibility for the incident on Moscow.
"We see, of course, attempts [by the court] to create the impression that this is not a criminal case but a state problem since Russia allegedly led these people. This is totally unacceptable", Lavrov said in an interview with Russia Today.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, crashed on 17 July 2014 in eastern Ukraine amid military clashes between the Ukrainian government and local self-proclaimed republics. All 298 people on board (most of them Dutch citizens) died.
After the incident, Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics in Donbass blamed each other for the crash. At the same time, the EU and the US immediately put the responsibility on Russia and slammed Moscow with several rounds of sanctions.
Netherlands announce preliminary investigation results of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crash
© Sputnik / Vitaliy Belousov
/ The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was established to probe the case; however, Russia was denied any access to the investigation. Russia launched its own investigation and provided the JIT with evidence, including radar data showing that the plane had been shot down by a Ukrainian Buk missile that had been stored in Ukraine since 1986 and never went back to Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
However, all of that information was ignored by the Dutch investigators, who insisted that the Buk missile had come from the Russian military.