OREANDA-NEWS. The court should dismiss the complaints of Ukraine and the Netherlands in the case of the crash of Malaysian plane MH17 in Donbas in 2014. Russia's representative to the European Court of Human Rights, Mikhail Vinogradov, said this.

"The Russian authorities ask the court to reject the complaints of the Dutch and Ukrainian authorities in their entirety,"- Vinogradov said.

He also called for Ukraine's complaint against Russia for restricting political activity in Donbass by the Donetsk and Luhansk regional authorities, filed in August 2015, to be rejected. According to Vinogradov, Kiev has no evidence of this fact.

The Boeing of flight MH17, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down in Donbass on 17 July 2014. All 298 passengers were killed. In May 2018, an international team of investigators (JIT) concluded that the plane was shot down from a launcher that belonged to the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade from Russia's Kursk region.

On 21 December 2021, the Dutch prosecutor's office said that the plane had been shot down by a Buk self-propelled launcher, which had been flown from Russia to Ukraine on the night of 16-17 July. It was launched from a field on the territory of the Donetsk people's republic-controlled village of Pervomayskyy. The following night, the installation was taken back to Russia, the prosecution believes.

The defendants in the case were former FSB colonel Igor Girkin, who was the DNR's defence minister in 2014, and the DNR's deputy military intelligence commander, Oleg Pulatov. According to the JIT, he was a member of the Russian GRU, as was DPR intelligence chief Sergey Dubinsky. Investigators believed that Ukrainian militiaman Leonid Kharchenko was also involved in the operation. The prosecution decided that they were not personally involved in the missile launch and that the Malaysian airliner was shot down by accident.

At the same time, the Dutch prosecutor's office accused Russia of "starting and continuing the war in eastern Ukraine" and supporting irregular military formations with weapons. The court hearings have been suspended until March 7, after which the defence will have the floor.