The Russian Defense Ministry said that the missile that destroyed the Malaysian Boeing over the Donbass in the summer of 2014 was placed in the military unit in western Ukraine and was not returned to the territory of Russia. This was stated by the head of the department of information and mass communications of the Ministry of Defense, Major-General Igor Konashenkov at a briefing in Moscow.
Allegedly in 1986, the 20152 military unit received a missile, with which the plane was shot down. In times of independent Ukraine, according to the Russian military, the unit was reformatted into 223 unit of AFU, based in Stryi (Lviv oblast). Based on these data, Russian propaganda claims that it is Ukraine that is responsible for the destruction of the Malaysian Boeing over the Donbass.
Russia calls a falsification the evidence gathered by the international investigation team of the involvement of the Russian air defense forces, including the completely tracked route of the Russian Buk complex, delivered to the occupied Donbass and its urgent evacuation to Russia after the catastrophe. Video about the movement of the Russian Buk, Russian propaganda called an animation, made "based on a single photo".
This is not the first "hundred percent proven" version of Russia's military and political leadership, shifting the blame for destroying a civilian plane to Ukraine. Earlier, the evidence that Boeing was shot down by an air-to-air missile was just as surely sounded. Even the surname of the Ukrainian pilot who "fulfilled" this task was called.
Flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down. It was shot down over the conflict zone in Ukraine's Donetsk region on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
In May, the Joint Investigative Team (JIT), comprising authorities from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine, has concluded that the Buk missile that shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 came from the 53rd Antiaircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia. After the JIT statement, the authorities of the Netherlands and Australia formally accused Russia of the catastrophe of the Malaysian Boeing. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that the Buk missile, which shot down the plane, does not belong to the Russian army.
On June 6, the Dutch government said it did not see the responsibility of the Ukrainian authorities for the catastrophe of the Malaysian Boeing in the sky over the Donbass in 2014. "According to the government, to date there is no legally convincing evidence that Ukraine committed a crime when it did not close its airspace", - a letter to deputies of the House of Representatives of the Dutch parliament said.