The European Union has marked the fifth anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 with a renewed call for Russia to accept responsibility for its role in the tragedy.
The call comes as relatives of those killed in the atrocity penned a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin demanding that he end the “denials deceit and lies” and some signatories delivered it to the Russian consular officer in Sydney.
The letter accuses the Russian government of hiding the truth and demands that those directly responsible for the crime, along with those in the chain of command, be held to account.
Russia has repeatedly denied involvement in the shooting down of the Boeing 777 with 298 passengers and crew on board as it crossed Ukrainian airspace while traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014.
It has had surprising support for Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, who has claimed Russia is being made a scapegoat and that the prosecutions are political.
This is despite extensive evidence gathered by the multi-national Joint Investigation Team that has led to three Russians and a Ukranian being charged with the murder of those on board.
The EU council reiterated its full support “for all efforts to establish truth, justice and accountability for the victims and their next of kin”.
“In this context, the EU welcomes the announcement by the Joint Investigation Team on 19 June 2019 that criminal charges will be brought in the Netherlands against four individuals,’’ it said.
“The EU calls on Russia to accept its responsibility and cooperate fully with the ongoing investigation. The EU expresses its full confidence in the independence and professionalism of the legal procedures that lie ahead.”
READ Russian role in MH17 “deeply immoral”, says Pompeo
The three Russians were named as Igor Vsevolodovich Girkin (48), Sergey Nikolayevich Dubinskiy (56) and Oleg Yuldashevich Pulatov (52). The Ukranian is Leonid Volodymyrovych Kharchenko (47).
The JIT has shown that MH17 was downed by a Russian-made BUK missile and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service alleges the four men cooperated to obtain and deploy the BUK TELAR that launched the missile at MH17 at the firing location with the aim of shooting down an aircraft.
Under Dutch law, that means they can be held jointly accountable for downing flight MH17 even if that was not their intention.
The men will be prosecuted for causing the crash of the Boeing 777 and the death of all those under one section of Dutch law and their murder under another.
The trial will start on March 9, 2020, before the District Court of The Hague at the Schiphol Judicial Complex.
The charges are the result of a long-running investigation that saw the JIT announce in 2016 MH17 was shot down by a missile from the 9M38 series and the BUK TELAR system from which it was launched was transported from the Russian Federation to an agricultural field near the town of Pervomaiskyi in Eastern Ukraine.
READ: Social media helps MH17 investigators identify Russian Army unit.
It was from here, investigators say, the missile was launched and, after firing, it returned to the Russian Federation with one missile missing.
Last year, The JIT concluded the BUK TELAR used to shoot down MH17 came from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, a unit of the Russian armed forces from Kursk in the Russian Federation.
The charges do not mean an end to the investigation and the JIT has yet to publicly identify who actually launched the missile.
