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Russian Airborne Forces Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Pulatov, who is accused of the Malaysian Boeing 777 crash in Donbas, told his lawyers that he had not seen a Buk anti-aircraft missile launcher on the DPR militants.
Oleg Pulatov, a Russian accused in the 2014 Malaysian Boeing 777 crash in Ukraine, answered questions from his lawyers. The videotaped meeting was shown today in a Dutch court in the case of the MH17 accident. It was decoded by the Russian Air Force.
Pulatov, who answered questions publicly for the first time, said that the day before the plane crash, he was in the area of the Stepanovka and Marinovka settlements, which are not far from the crash site.
He said that on the eve of the plane crash he did not order the transport of the Buk anti-aircraft missile launcher, did not accompany or transport it.
“I didn’t even know at all if the military had such a Buk system,” Pulatov noted. He claims that the “Buks” were in the hands of the Ukrainian army, whose units were deployed in the area of the village of Zaroshchenskoye.
The BBC recalls that the Ukrainian authorities provided the Netherlands with information on the status of all its Buk facilities in July 2017. The data coincided with information received by Dutch military intelligence. As a result, the investigation rejected the version that MH17 could have been shot down by a Buk of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Pulatov also said that on the day of the plane crash, he was indeed in the Snezhnoye area (the closest large city to the crash site) and was supposedly solving financial problems. He stressed that while moving between various positions of the DPR militants, he did not see the Buk.
The former militant also told lawyers that he knew of Ukraine’s wiretapping of his phone. He stressed that he allegedly later used his number “to misinform and mislead the enemy.”
Pulatov is one of four defendants in the Malaysian Boeing accident. In addition to him, two Russians are involved in the case: the “former DPR Minister of Defense” Igor Girkin and the former head of “DPR intelligence” Sergei Dubinsky, as well as a Ukrainian, the commander of the reconnaissance battalion ” GRU DPR “Leonid Kharchenko. All of them on June 19, 2019, the international investigation team announced suspicions of participation in the disaster.
Boeing 777, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on flight MH17, crashed on July 17, 2014 near Torez, Donetsk region. All 298 people on board died (citizens of the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Indonesia, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Philippines, Canada and New Zealand).
According to the findings of the international investigation team, flight MH17 was shot down from the Buk compound in the territory controlled by pro-Russian militants. After the plane crash, the weapon was returned to the Russian Federation. Investigators clarified that the Buk came to Donbass from the Kursk region. In May 2018, the Netherlands and Australia officially blamed Russia for the crash of flight MH17. Russia denies its involvement in the disaster.
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