When is Ukraine going to make compensatory payments to families of Russian airliner crash victims?

The end of May will see the beginning of considering the second suit comprised of eleven suits initiated by the families of the passengers and crewmembers killed in the Russian Tu-154 crash over the Black Sea.

According to representative of a law firm Vitaly Vakulenko, defending the interests of the victims' relatives, the defendants of the case are the Ukrainian Government, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry and the Ukrainian Treasury.

Due to the registration of necessary documents representative of another law firm Andrei Kozlov, defending the government's interests in court, could not announce the names of the Tu-154 dead passengers and crewmembers, whose relatives had brought new suits.

When speaking about the statement of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry's State Secretary Alexander Chalov about the country's willingness to resolve the issue of compensatory payments judicially, Mr. Vakulenko said that the plaintiffs had not been addressed in person and, therefore, could not make any decision.

The Tu-154 airliner of the Russian Sibir company en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk was supposedly brought down on October 4th 2001 by a Ukrainian C-200 missile launched in the course of anti-missile defence exercises in the Crimea. The crash killed 78 people - 66 passengers /mostly Israelis/ and 12 crewmembers /all Russians/.