MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The Sydney law firm LHD Lawyers was reported to file a lawsuit seeking $7.2 million on behalf of five families of Australian victims from Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier in the day.
"There is not a single piece of evidence of Russian involvement in the Boeing-777 crash in Donbas [eastern Ukraine]. The lawsuit against our country filed with the ECHR in this case is legally null and void and has no prospects," Franz Klintsevich, deputy chair of the Russian upper house of parliament’s defense and security committee, told reporters.
Klintsevich noted that the lawsuit hampers the ongoing five-country investigation of the crash, noting his personal interest in an objective and comprehensive probe.
"I think we have every reason to objectively interpret the lawsuit, regardless of the intentions of its authors, as an element of psychological warfare waged against Russia," he stressed.
Dutch investigators published a report in October 2015 that said that the Malaysia Airlines aircraft appeared to have been downed using a Russia-produced Buk surface-to-air missile system. It did not identify the exact location from where the missile was fired.
The Russian arms manufacturer that builds Buk missile systems, Almaz-Antey, conducted a separate probe into the crash, finding that the missile that hit the plane could only have been launched by a Buk system located in the region of Zaroshchenske, controlled by Kiev forces at the time of the incident.
