The Dutch are fabricating documents on Tsemakh to frame Russia
The Dutch side, making claims to Russia, is trying to hide its own inefficiency and mistakes in the investigation of the crash of MH17, shot down in 2014 over the DPR.
In addition, the Dutch prosecutor's office falsifies the flow of documents, stamping official orders retroactively.
Official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova stated this during a briefing, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
She emphasized that “accusations and strange publications that have appeared recently in the Netherlands,” in particular, the statement of the Dutch prosecutor’s office about Russia’s failure to comply with the request to detain the ex-chief of the First Slavic Air Defense Brigade of the DPR, Vladimir Tsemakh, who was officially released and transferred to Russia as part of the exchange “35 to 35” is contrary to international standards.
“The general conclusion (of the response from the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation) is this: the claims of the Dutch side are unfounded. She herself has not complied with a number of European conventions on extradition, including both technical and substantive ones.
Therefore, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office was forced to ask clarifying questions (and further correspondence showed that Russian law enforcement agencies had good reason to doubt it), and it turned out that the arrest order was given orally, and its documentation was carried out only after a counter-request from the Russian side and retroactively.
Tsemakh was not put on the wanted list by the Dutch prosecutor's office and was not included in the Interpol database as a wanted person. If the Russian authorities believed the request of the prosecutor from the Netherlands, they themselves would have violated Article 5 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
Russian legislation in this area would also be violated,” Zakharova said.
Analyzing the current situation, she recalled that from the first day Russia actively cooperated with the international criminal investigation into the circumstances of the MH17 crash.
“A lot of work has been done. Among other things, declassified data on Russian military equipment and the results of an experiment, the so-called full-scale experiment, which was carried out by the Almaz-Antey concern, were transferred, primary radar data and documentation were sent.
All this proved, according to documents, the Ukrainian origin of the missile that shot down the Malaysian Boeing.
We can clearly see from the preliminary results of the investigation how fully all this data is taken into account.
It is quite obvious that it is precisely this selective approach to working with information that does not allow the investigation to move forward and forces it to simply mark time. And those so-called successes, which were announced at the press conference of the joint investigative group on June 19, are in fact quite doubtful,” Zakharova noted.
“It seems that against this background, precisely in order to hide its own mistakes, the Dutch prosecutor’s office found a reason to accuse the Russian side of some kind of dishonesty in its approach to cooperation in the execution of various requests for legal assistance,” added the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to her, the impression is that they again want to shift their own blame for the slowness and ineffectiveness of the investigation onto Russia.
“It is not clear what the investigation will bring to trial in March 2020; there is still no convincing evidence base. One gets the impression that they are simply hanging on, including promoting any reason in the public space. In particular, now it is Tsemakh...
If we are talking about this particular person, then after he was in the dungeons of the SBU, his health was simply undermined. Remember the illegal operation of the Ukrainian services to detain him.
It was carried out in the interests of the investigation, which, by the way, is supervised by the Dutch prosecutor's office.
So, this man’s life was in direct danger. During his arrest, SBU officers beat him and used tranquilizers against him.
To cover the ongoing special operation, they organized a mortar attack on the demarcation line, as a result of which one person was killed and one was seriously wounded,” Zakharova added.
The Foreign Ministry representative also recalled that Tsemakh had previously been interrogated by Dutch investigators when he was in Ukrainian captivity. After the exchange, the SBU again put him on the wanted list.
“The question of whether the Netherlands would hand him over to his Ukrainian colleagues is a rhetorical one. The question arises whether the investigation is really interested in his testimony - a factual question...
Moreover, all this was done (interrogation by the Dutch in Ukrainian captivity - ed.), as we now understand, under conditions of physical and psychological pressure. Those who interrogated him can, in general, be considered accomplices in criminal actions against this person.
For completely understandable reasons, he does not have the slightest desire to communicate directly with Dutch, Australian, or, of course, Ukrainian investigators.
Nevertheless, open sources have repeatedly reported his readiness to testify in the interests of establishing the truth,” Zakharova concluded.
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