MOSCOW. March 9 (Interfax) - The Russian Defense Ministry has commented on publications by Bellingcat, a journalistic organization, about Russia's alleged involvement in the Malaysian Boeing crash in Donbas.
"The so-called journalistic inquiries by Bellingcat misrepresent objective facts. The information provided is consciously anti-Russian and built on misrepresented data. Moreover, it uses baseless claims designed to make an exclusively information impact on the society," the ministry spokesperson said on Monday.
"The main purpose of the data falsified by Bellingcat consists in the attempts to prove the presence of Russian troops in the supposed launch site of the missile that hit the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on July 17, 2014," the ministry said.
To this day, no one has provided any real evidence of the Russian Armed Forces' presence in Ukraine, the ministry said.
To substantiate their conclusions, the authors of the report used data from social media websites, various fake Internet publications, and their own dubious material which under no circumstances could be regarded as real evidence of Russia's involvement in the Ukrainian conflict, the ministry said.
"Actually, the latest Bellingcat report, like all previous ones, is also built on pseudo-hypotheses," the ministry said.
As proof of the Russian troops' presence in Ukraine, the report provides a photo of someone appearing to be a militiaman, which was ostensibly taken at a Buk rocket launch site on July 20, 2014, i.e. already after the Malaysian Boeing crash, the ministry said. "It is exclusively on this dubious material that Bellingcat are making a conclusion about the Russian troops' presence in the supposed rocket launch site," the ministry said.
"Contrary to Bellingcat's hollow claims, the person on the picture has nothing to do with the Russian Armed Forces: he has never been a member of the Russian military service. Anyone can easily establish this by spending some time on the Internet," the ministry said.
The developers of the image analysis software used by the bloggers in one of their "investigations" once commented on the "authenticity" of the pictures circulated by Bellingcat, the ministry said. According to the developer, Bellingcat's work is an example of how not to analyze and process images, it said.
Besides, the Bellingcat conclusions were disproved as baseless and incompetent after several investigations conducted by authoritative western media outlets, the ministry said.
"What can be said in general if in their conclusion the pseudo-experts themselves acknowledged that at this point there is no possibility to provide objective evidence in their so-called investigations," the ministry said.
It is appalling that such dubious material is taken into account by the joint investigative group, "an organization which leads the official inquiry and claims to be objective and professional," the ministry said.
"Concurrently, this group has from the outset refuted the evidence from Rosaviatsia [Russia's Federal Air Transport Agency], having simply stated that all this was 'uninteresting.' Uninteresting, apparently because these data do not fit into a pre-determined model of the tragedy. We are certain that all data without exception, relating to the Boeing tragedy, must be studied and thoroughly analyzed," the ministry said.