It has applied economic sanctions against Moscow, which protects these republics, and has admitted having coerced the European Union into doing the same.
On September 10, the authorities of the Netherlands, in charge of the investigation, released a preliminary report on the tragedy.
They confirmed that the aircraft disintegrated in flight because of "damage caused by external impact from numerous high-energy objects." However, neither the nature nor the origin of these projectiles was elucidated.
Ivan A. Andrievskii, vice-president of the Russian Union of Engineers, put out a report showing that the aircraft was shot down by 30mm cannon fire from one or more fighter jets. Moreover, it has been established that no Russian fighter was in Ukrainian airspace at that time.
On October 7, Frans Timmermans, who was Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister at the time of the event and is currently first vice president of the European Commission, plied with questions from journalist Jeroen Pauw regarding the information that prompted him to intervene before the UN Security Council, indicated that the body of one passenger was found wearing an oxygen mask. A piece of information that does not appear in the report released by his country and which trashes the theory of a shoot down by a surface-to-air missile.
On October 8, the German secret service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), in a closed session before the Bundestag commission in charge of intelligence oversight, presented a report concluding that the Malaysian Boeing was shot down by a Bouk surface-to-air missile launched by the Self-Defense Forces of Donbass.
In all likelihood, the BND had not been informed about the interview given by Frans Timmermans the night before.
Der Spiegel released the contents of this hearing in its issue of October 19. [2]. However, the German weekly points out that for the BND the only two certainties are:
- (1) that the photographs provided by the Ukrainian government are false and
- (2) that Russia’s allegations according to which the aircraft had been downed by the Ukrainian army and that Ukrainian jets had approached the plane are also false. Therefore the BND is skeptical about its own conclusions.
On October 20, the director of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rossaviatsia), Alexander Neradko, invited the German intelligence services to publish documentation demonstrating the involvement of the insurgents or of the Ukrainian army in the disaster.
Notes:
- [1] “Analysis of the reasons for the crash of flight MH17”, by Ivan A. Andrievskii, Оdnako (Russia), Voltaire Network, 27 September 2014. Original russian, in Portuguese, in German.
- [2] Original German: "Ostukraine: BND macht Separatisten für MH17-Absturz verantwortlich". English version: "Deadly Ukraine Crash: German Intelligence Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17", Der Spiegel, 19 October 2014.
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