Ukrainian Leader, Australian Minister Call for Justice Over MH17 Downing

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop "expressed a common position that terrorist acts cannot stay unpunished" during Bishop's official visit.

KIEV (Sputnik) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop discussed on Thursday the need to bring to justice those responsible for the 2014 downing of flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine.

Poroshenko met Bishop as part of his visit to the United States.

According to the Ukrainian leader's press service, Poroshenko and Bishop "expressed a common position that terrorist acts cannot stay unpunished."

Flight MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014, over eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, leaving no survivors among 298 people on board. Local militia and Ukrainian government forces active in the region at the time traded blame for the incident.

Dutch investigators published a report last October saying that the airliner appeared to have been downed using a Buk surface-to-air missile. a warhead was fired from anywhere within a 320 square kilometer (123 square mile) area of eastern Ukraine, the report said, without specifying who was responsible for the launch.

In a separate probe into the crash, Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey said the missile had exploded near the left side of the aircraft. Almaz-Antey considered this to be proof that the projectile could only be a missile from a Buk system launched from the region of Zaroshchenske, controlled by the Kiev forces at the time of the incident.