Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin has pledged to use all international legal mechanisms to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin accountable for the downing of flight MH17.
Kostin’s comment was published by the Prosecutor General’s Office, according to Ukrinform.
“Some of those directly involved in the crime have already been sentenced to life imprisonment. Unfortunately, the difficulty in obtaining evidence and functional immunity do not allow the Russian president to be tried in the national courts of the countries of the Joint Investigation Team. We will seek to use all existing international legal mechanisms to bring him to justice,” the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office quoted Kostin as saying.
According to the report, during a meeting of the Joint Investigation Team investigating the downing of flight MH17 with the relatives of the victims, an interception of an alleged phone call between the Russian president and the “LNR” leader in 2017 was made public. The latter addresses his interlocutor as “Mr. President.”
“What all Ukrainians knew a long time ago was officially announced today as the conclusion of the Joint Investigation Team investigating the crash of flight MH17,” Kostin said.
He said that now no one has any doubt about the involvement of Russia’s top leadership in this disaster. “It was the president of the aggressor country who gave the criminal order to supply weapons to the “DNR” and “LNR” groups. This was the root cause of the tragedy that claimed the lives of 298 civilians,” Kostin added.
The Joint Investigation Team investigating the downing of flight MH17 in July 2014 in the sky over the Donetsk region concluded that there are strong indications that the Russian president decided to supply heavy weapons to “DNR” militants.
On November 17, 2022, the District Court of The Hague passed a verdict in the MH17 case, finding three Russian militants – Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinsky and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko — guilty of shooting down an airliner of Malaysia Airlines and sentencing them to life imprisonment.
The investigation into the MH17 crash continues.
Photo: Prosecutor General’s Office
Source: MH17 case: Kostin vows to use all mechanisms to punish Putin
