Russia rejects 'biased' UN ruling on 2014 downing of Malaysian airliner

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Tuesday rejected as biased a ruling by the U.N. aviation council that Russia was responsible for the downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in 2014 that killed all 298 passengers and crew.

"Our position is well known. You know that Russia was not a country that took part in the investigation of this incident, so we do not accept any biased conclusions," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

Russia's Foreign Ministry issued its own denunciation of the aviation council's ruling.

"Russia will not recognise the Council's decision. It is not legitimate," the ministry said on its website.

It said the "main guilty party" of the 2014 incident was the Ukrainian government in Kyiv which at the time was battling Russian-financed separatists in its eastern Donbas region. Those operations, it said, were conducted "under the false pretext of fighting terrorism".

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 departed from Amsterdam for Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, and was shot down over eastern Ukraine as fighting raged between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces.

The victims included 196 Dutch citizens and 38 Australian citizens or residents.

In November 2022, Dutch judges convicted two Russian men and a Ukrainian man in absentia of murder for their role in the attack. Moscow called the ruling "scandalous" and said it would not extradite its citizens.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Mark Trevelyan; editing by Mark Heinrich, Ron Popeski and David Gregorio)

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