OREANDA-NEWS. The Attorney General’s Office of the Netherlands commented on the situation with the former commander of one of the air defense units of Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Vladimir Tsemakh, who is considered a suspect in the case of the crash of a Malaysian airplane Boeing in the Donbass.

Malaysian Boeing, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur by flight MH17, crashed on July 17, 2014 near the city of Donetsk. 298 people were onboard, all of them died.

In June 2019, Ukrainian intelligence services stole Tsemakh from his apartment in the city of Snezhnoye (DPR) and took him to Kiev. In September, he was freed in the course of the simultaneous release of people detained by Russia and Ukraine.

The Attorney General’s Office of the Netherlands said that it had sent to Moscow a request for the arrest and extradition of Tsemakh so that he could not escape. The agency believes that Russia had no legal obstacles to extraditing a suspect, since he is a citizen of Ukraine.

The statement says that on November 19 the agency received a notice from the Russian authorities that they did not know where Tsemakh was. At the same time, the agency, referring to media information, notes that suspect returned to his home in Eastern Ukraine, from where he cannot be extradited. “The Attorney General’s Office concluded that Russia deliberately allowed Tsemakh to leave the Russian Federation and refused to comply with the request of the Netherlands, as it was obliged to do according to the European Convention on Extradition," the communiqué says.

It is noted that the Attorney General’s Office reported about its position to the Russian authorities and relatives of the victims of the crashed airplane.