Australia says will continue push for MH17 prosecution

But Russian President Vladimir Putin said that efforts to create the United Nations tribunal were premature and counterproductive, since an investigation into what happened, led by the Dutch transportation safety board and due to report in October, is still ongoing.

“We [the 5 countries] will not budge and will submit another appeal in 2 months”.

“Russia has callously disregarded the public outcry in the grieving nations”, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said, adding that the United States was among the 18 countries that lost citizens in the disaster. They accuse the pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane.

Russian presidential press officer Dmitry Peskov has called the statements by Kyiv on the possible submission to the UN General Assembly of the issue of the creation of an worldwide tribunal for the investigation into the Malaysian Boeing crash as prospectless.

Mr. Churkin said that past global tribunals, including to investigate the Rwandan genocide and violence in the former Yugoslavia, were “expensive”.

“It is hard to explain how the event, which wasn’t considered a threat to worldwide peace and security a year ago, now suddenly becomes one”, he said. “Russia stands ready to cooperate in the conduct of a full, independent and objective investigation of the reasons and circumstances of the crash”.

“The position that we took today has nothing to do with the promotion of impunity”, he concluded.

The representative of China to the UN, Liu Jieyi, also attributed his decision to abstain from voting by the “prematureness” of the tribunal and the fact that it could only lead to a split among members of the Security Council.

Russian Federation had offered its own draft that demanded justice for those responsible for the crash without calling for a tribunal.

Experts approached by RIR for comment said that the results of the vote were predictable. The Russian Defence Ministry has made available satellite images, radar and other data that call the Ukrainian government’s official narrative of events into question.

In order to prevent its “frame-up”, Moscow had to veto the resolution in the UN, and now it is accused by the West “of hiding its complicity in the attack on the airliner and opposing justice for Malaysia“, Dr. Roberts noted.

“We’re not about to give up on that”, Klimkin said.

In particular, this may be linked to the need to strengthen the sanctions regime, or “at least against this background, it will be very hard to talk about their removal”, he said.

Incidentally, seven more countries supported the extension of EU sanctions against Crimea and Sevastopol on July 30 – Montenegro, Iceland, Albania, Norway, Ukraine, Liechtenstein and Georgia.