MOSCOW. June 3 (Interfax) - Russian Federation Council international affairs committee head Konstantin Kosachyov has branded the U.S.' accusations of the Donbas militia of downing the Malaysia Airlines Boeing in Ukraine nearly a year ago as absurd.
"The U.S. accusations addressed at the militia are political cynicism reduced to international legal farce," Kosachyov said in a Facebook post.
"According to Department of State representative Marie Harf, the U.S. position on the downed Boeing 'has been clear from the beginning that MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-controlled territory'," Kosachyov said.
Moreover, the Department of State official expressed confidence that "no Ukrainian air defense systems were within range of the crash, and Ukrainian forces have not fired a single surface-to-air missile during the conflict," he said.
For Kosachyov, the key words in the statement are "from the beginning."
"That is, no investigations, analyses, or tests are needed. Justice triumphed even before it started," he said.
Harf had said in a press briefing on Tuesday that Washington remained confident that the Malaysia Airlines plane had been shot down by a missile fired from territory controlled by the militia.
Experts from Almaz-Antey, a leading Russian manufacturer of air defense systems, had presented their case on Tuesday to prove that the Boeing had been intercepted by a 9M38M1 missile fired by a Buk-M1 air defense system.
Almaz-Antey chief Yan Novikov said at a Tuesday press conference that missiles of this type and Buk-M1 systems had been on the Ukrainian armed forces' inventory.
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur had crashed in the Donetsk region on July 17, 2014, killing all the 298 people on board. The primary theory considered at the moment is that the plane had been intercepted by a surface-to-air missile.