Dutch Authorities’ Attempted To Pressure Hague District Court Before Start Of MH17 Trial

Sputnik / Maksim Blinov

The ongoing MH17 trial became another evidence that the investigation of the 2014 tragedy in eastern Ukraine turned into a political circus designed to promote the mainstream anti-Russian narrative regardless all the gaps and disconnects in it.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Dutch authorities even attempted  to pressure The Hague District Court before the start of the MH127 trial. A detailed statement on the topic was made by a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mariya Zakharova on March 6.

Dutch authorities’ attempts to pressure The Hague District Court before the start of the MH17 trial (source):

We are seeing the information campaign in the Netherlands gain new momentum as the trial for the July 2014 MH17 crash over eastern Ukraine approaches at The Hague District Court on March 9. All this is coming, in no small measure, from the Netherlands Prosecutor’s Office, which is the lead in the work of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT MH17).

This is being done to shape public opinion in the right way, to prepare the ground in order to highlight and, perhaps, in some sense, secure the so-called achievements of nearly six years of work. This, of course, is far from the high standards that our Western partners refer to.

Due to the apparent lack of anything new beyond the repeated accusations, the JIT made a very strange move they probably see as spectacular (again, as part of the accelerating information campaign) in announcing they had witnesses whose names and identities were, predictably, classified. I can even remember questions to this effect, and more than once, and also during one of the briefings. This sounds like the same old magic formula, “we know for sure it was you who did this from secret sources we cannot disclose,” already a handy tool in a number of high-profile cases, events and incidents, now being applied on a larger scale.

I recognise this hallmark style, that of planted news citing some mythical “irrefutable” evidence, with witnesses’ details classified and links to sources that cannot be opened. At the same time, important matters of direct relevance to the tragedy – such as Ukraine’s failure to close its airspace to civilian aircraft due to the internal armed conflict in the summer 2014 – which the Dutch parliamentarians seemed interested in, have apparently slipped from public discourse. The huge package of information about the crash provided by Russia continues to be ignored. The investigators are not interested in why all the prosecutors involved in the MH17 inquiry were fired just before the start of the trial in Ukraine.

Yet, the media campaign is gaining unprecedented momentum, with a clear accusatory bias towards Russia and – something absolutely unacceptable – against its citizens. This has been unleashed in the last days before the trial in order to compensate for the gaps in the evidence, to hide the juggling of facts to fit the pre-selected version. Another reason is probably to inspire the idea that the probe was impeccable and predetermine the verdict in advance and prevent any deviation from the line drawn up six years ago.

I just have one question. Is it even acceptable practice to launch such an information campaign before a court trial? Have you seen a precedent for this anywhere?

We believe all of the above is a grossly apparent attempt to put pressure on the court.