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Serial numbers of missile that downed MH17 tells it was produced in 1986, owned by Ukraine - Russia Serial numbers of missile that downed MH17 tells it was produced in 1986, owned by Ukraine - Russia
(35 minutes later)
The serial numbers found on debris of the Buk missile that shot down the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine show it was produced in 1986, the Russian military said. The rocket was owned by Ukraine, they added.
There are two serial numbers found on fragments of a rocket, which has shut down the passenger airliner in June 2014, according to an international team of investigators led by the Netherlands. They marked the engine and the nozzle of the projectile.
DETAILS TO FOLLOW The Russian military on Monday said they traced them to a particular missile, which has serial number 8868720.
Speaking to journalists, Gen. Nikolay Parshin, showed a document trail of the Buk missile. According to the documents, some of which have been declassified for the presentation, it was produced at a military plant in Dolgoprudny in Moscow region in 1986.
The missile was shipped from the plant on December 29, 1986 and delivered to a military unit 20152 located in what is now Ukraine. It is now called 223rd anti-aircraft defense regiment of the Ukrainian armed forces, the report said. The unit took part in Kiev’s crackdown on rebels in eastern Ukraine in June 2014, the general said.
The evidence disproove the accusations by Ukraine and some other parties, which claim that a Russian missile fired by a launcher secretly delivered from Russia was responsible for the downing of MH17, the Ministry of Defense's report said. All the materials have been sent to the Dutch investigators, the Russian military added.
The Russian military also challenges video footage used by the UK-based group Bellingcat, which calls itself a citizen journalism organization, to back its allegations about the delivery of the Buk launcher from Russia. The Defense Ministry showed a video clip with some of the footage, highlighting inconsistencies, which it said proved that the footage had been manipulated to post images of the launcher into background where none had been in the original.
The video showed an example of how an Abrams tank can be shown carried by a trailer in the streets of Ukraine in the same way.
Gen. Igor Konashenkov, who hosted the briefing, reminded that Ukraine failed to provide radar data from its stations to the Dutch investigators. He also suggested that archive documents from the Ukrainian unit, which received the Buk missile back in 1986, would be of use to the probe, unless Kiev claims that they are no longer available. He stressed the rules mandate that such documents are still stored in Ukraine.
The Russian military said they had no evidence to disprove a scenario, involving the Ukrainian rebels capturing the missile from the Ukrainian army, but pointed out that Ukrainian officials publicly denied anything like this ever happened.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, falling in the rebel-help part of the country. The crash claimed the lives of 283 passengers and 15 crew members, most of them Dutch nationals. Russia was blamed by the Western media from the first days after the tragedy, even before any evidence was collected on the ground.
The Joint Investigation Team, which is lead by the Netherlands, includes Ukraine, but not Russia. Moscow believes that the investigation is biased, failing to obtain all necessary evidence form Ukraine and relying on questionable sources while ignoring evidence provided by Russia, which doesn’t fit into the theory favored by Kiev and its foreign sponsors.