The head of the Australian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Julia Bishop, said that it is premature to talk about the findings of the investigation into the catastrophe of the Malaysian Boeing MH17, shot down in the sky over the Donbass in 2014.
“The investigation continues, and when it is completed, its results will be passed on to the prosecutors for legal action, which Australia also strongly supports,” the Australian Foreign Minister stressed. “It’s impossible to form an opinion on the evidence, because they have not been announced yet.”
Earlier, Bishop made much more confident statements about this. So, in October 2016, she argued that it was necessary to find the perpetrators of the destruction of the aircraft “in the Russian military command.”
A new statement from Bishop was voiced after her New Zealand colleague Winston Peters told the local newspaper Newshub that there was no evidence of Russia’s involvement in the destruction of a civilian aircraft.
“You say that the man who launched the missile did so at the order of Russia. The big problem is that your argument from the legal point of view immediately sags, because you have no proof of this,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs of New Zealand.
Speaking about the proposal to resume negotiations on the establishment of a free trade zone with Russia suspended in 2014, Peters stressed that his country can not waste time waiting for the outcome of the investigation.