US journalists gave a reason to accuse the CIA of architecting major provocative operations against Russia with the help of Ukraine. The purpose was to find more "evidence" to prove that Russia was guilty of the MH17 disaster.
It goes about the interview with "former high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officers", in which one of them claimed that the CIA partially financed the operation that Ukraine conducted to lure 33 Russian citizens detained in Belarus, to Ukraine. "Technical assistance and advice" to Ukraine from the CIA was also part of the case.
Military expert Yury Knutov, a specialist in air defense systems, told Pravda.Ru that the CIA supervises Ukraine's special services for a long time already. CIA officers, Knutov said, may take a whole floor of the building of the Security Service of Ukraine. Even if no one had written anything on the subject, it would have been clear that it was the Americans that were masterminds of the whole operation, the expert told Pravda. Ru.
According to him, covert operations got exposed at a time when the CIA and the Joe Biden administration could not figure out whom to blame for the shameful NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Noteworthy, CNN noted that the interview was recorded on the outskirts of Kiev. It appears that the information surfaced at the initiative of Ukraine, but damage to the reputation could be much more serious than that the USA had to deal with in Afghanistan.
The key point in the interview is the episode, when a former Ukrainian intelligence officer claimed:
"There were two (among 33 Russians — ed.) who were present when the missile that downed MH17 was launched. Four others were members of a group responsible for shooting down our military aircraft and killing at least 70 of our best men," the interview reads.
In addition, CNN states:
"One video, shared with CNN by the former military intelligence sources, captures a group of rebel fighters in eastern Ukraine holding up the wreckage of a military aircraft that the sources said had just been shot down, a crime designated as terrorism in Ukraine."
It appears that those "former military intelligence sources" had no time to share such videos with anyone else before.
In a nutshell, the entire story in the form of the interview was concocted in an attempt to establish Russia's connection with the MH17 disaster yet again. The trial in the Netherlands is coming to an end, but there is no evidence found. This is indirectly shown by two things:
The international Joint Investigation Team investigating the crash of the Malaysian Boeing (which includes Ukraine) announced that the Buk anti-aircraft missile system that struck the passenger airliner had been allegedly delivered from Russia. Afterwards, the air defense missile system was returned back to the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade in Kursk.
In the summer of 2019, Dutch prosecutors, proceeding from this information, brought charges against three Russian citizens:
Pulatov was the only one who agreed to participate in the trial in absentia. His defense announced that prosecutors were trying "at any cost" to prove that Flight MH17 was shot down with a Buk missile, while ignoring evidence and facts pointing in a different direction. For example, the crash site had not been examined for four months, therefore, "the evidence may have been either lost or compromised," Pulatov's lawyer Boudewijn Van Eijck said.
According to the lawyer, the Security Service of Ukraine provided audio recordings of only the militia of the People's Republic of Donetsk, but provided no recordings of conversations of the Ukrainian military. In addition, virtually all the materials provided by Ukraine would be accepted by investigators as corroborating evidence, he noted, adding that the information provided by the Russian Federation would always be called misleading.
The lawyer also noted that many Ukrainian prosecutors who were investigating the MH17 case had been dismissed from their jobs.
"After the dismissal, one of the prosecutors said that he wanted to prove the guilt of the Russian side. I think that this comment clearly reflects the position of the Ukrainian side — to accuse the Russian Federation, rather than to establish the truth,” Boudewijn Van Eijck explained.
Yuri Knutov shares the opinion of the lawyer. In a comment for Pravda. Ru, he noted that he could not understand many things that the court considered and accepted as evidence."
"For example, a rocket always explodes above a target. Almaz-Antey conducted full-scale experiments: they blew up rockets from both sides above the cockpit and then showed on fragments distribution where the rocket came from. We proved that it was a Ukrainian rocket. What did Ukraine do? They took a warhead, put it on the ground, surrounded it with wooden shields, blew it up and said that it was the evidence," said Yuri Knutov.
The expert is sure that the authorities would not have dared to move the Buk system with combat missiles around Russian cities for safety reasons.
"This case is overwhelmed with falsifications from beginning to end,” Yuri Knutov clarified. According to him, the United States only needs "to provide its satellite images, where it can be seen that the rocket was launched from the Donetsk territory," but this was not done.
In March 2020, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused the Dutch authorities of putting pressure on the court. It is an open secret that it was after the MH17 disaster, when the West imposed most stringent sanctions on Russia. The blow to the image of the United States in the world would be overwhelming, should the charges prove to be fabricated. Europe will be the first to lift the sanctions.
The court is to deliver the verdict before December 15, 2022.
The Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed on July 17, 2014 in the Donetsk region. All 298 people on board were killed.