Ukraine President Offers Parliament to Extend Work of Mission on MH17 Crash

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko proposed the parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, extending the work of the mission of inquiry into the Malaysian Flight MH17 airliner crash in Donbas until August 1, 2017, the parliament's website showed.

KIEV (Sputnik) — A draft law on the ratification of the agreement between Ukraine and the Netherlands to extend the existing 2014 agreement was registered on Rada's website. As of Tuesday, the full text of the document is not yet available.

The legal stages of the draft document note that the document has already been sent to the Ukrainian parliament.

In July 2014, the agreement between Ukraine and the Kingdom of the Netherlands on international mission to protect investigations was signed, along with an agreement between Ukraine and Australia on sending personnel to Ukraine in connection with the MH17 crash.

The two documents envisage practical engagement of police, military and non-military experts from the Netherlands and Australia, other states whose citizens were aboard the MH17 plane until the reasons of the crash are investigated.

Flight MH17 crashed with 298 people on board on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine, while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, leaving no survivors. Kiev and independence supporters in Ukraine’s southeast have blamed each other for the downing of the MH17 plane. Most of the victims were Dutch citizens, and the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) was chosen to head the international investigation.