Today the world marks a year since the crash of the Boeing 777 of Malaysian Airlines in the Donetsk Region of Ukraine. On board the aircraft were 298 people. There were no survivors of the crash. Yesterday Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada appealed to the UN and the parliaments of all countries to support the establishment of an international tribunal on the airplane crash, which should find and punish those who were guilty in the tragedy. They say that the airplane was shot down by a missile; but there are no official results of the investigation yet. The West believes that the Boeing was shot by militants, they say that they know the coordinates of the place from which the missile was launched and that at that moment it was controlled by the Donetsk militants. However, the speaker of the People’s Council of the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, Andrei Purgin, said that the militants didn’t control the region from which the Boeing was supposed to have been shot down.
Oleg Storchevoy, Deputy Head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, says that there are factors pointing to the downing of the aircraft by a surface-to-air missile and by an air-to-air missile. Aviation specialists, experts in the field of rocketry, also cannot clearly come to any conclusion. But unfortunately we do not have access to the materials, or to the full materials of the investigation.
“If we had been allowed to use all the available materials and information, I am sure that we would be able to give our well-grounded explanation. Only careful work on the examination of the smallest details can determine the reasons for the crash of the airliner,” Storchevoy says.
If we speak about the possibility of the destruction of the aircraft by a surface-to-air missile, Storchevoy says that we must examine the information presented by the Almaz-Antey PVO Concern. On the basis of the available information of the damaged aircraft and the examination of fragments of the Boeing, the concern's experts estimated the trajectory of the missile, if it had been a missile of a ground air-defense missile system. Information was used of tactical and technical characteristics during the calculations of a Buk missile complex. The security label was declassified in respect of this information. This was done for only one purpose: to send to the Commission the information for an objective investigation. Let me remind you that the experts of the concern came to the conclusion that if the aircraft was struck by a ground anti-missile system, it could only have been from a Buk-M1 complex. The missile launch could have been made only from the area of the village of Zaroschenskoye. From any other area the missile would have struck the aircraft from a different angle. Accordingly, the damage would have had a totally different character.
According to experts, in the case of a missile being launched from Zaroschenskoye, radar stations could fix neither the trajectory of the missile, nor the process of movement of the missile to the aircraft.
According to Storchevoy, “according to the version of the West, the missile was launched at the plane from the Snezhny area. However, according to the opinions of all the experts, it would have appeared several times on the avian radar in Rostov.”
All the calculations of the Almaz-Antei experts were presented to the International Commission.
Moscow thinks that it is also necessary to examine carefully all the facts in respect of the version of the destruction of the aircraft by an air-to-air missile. There are numerous records of witnesses of the accident, local residents, who say they saw a military aircraft in the sky at the time of the Boeing crash. The Investigative Committee of Russia issued a recording of an interview with a Ukrainian serviceman, who claims that fighters with air-to-air missiles flew from the Ukrainian airfield on the day of the accident. “Certainly, this must be carefully examined. I also saw that a report by a group of aviation specialists was recently published. On the basis of existing photographs they have calculated the angle of the strike, the size and weight of the possible damaging elements, and proved that the aircraft could be hit only by air-to-air missiles of foreign manufacture, as the Russian Federation has no missiles with such characteristics. I say that the calculations presented in the document are very competent. It is clear that the specialists have deep expertise in the investigation of accidents.”
