Missile maker insists Russians could not have shot down flight MH17

The Russian company that makes the BUK air defense system that was used to shoot down a Malaysian airliner in east Ukraine said on Tuesday the plane was hit by a missile deployed by Ukraine and not widely used by Russia’s military. State-run Almaz-Antey said its own analysis of the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines plane brought down on July 17 last year, killing 298 people, indicated it was hit by a BUK 9M38M1 surface-to-air missile armed with a 9H314M warhead. Shrapnel holes in the plane were consistent with that kind of missile and warhead, it said.

Neither the company nor its enterprises could have supplied these rockets in the 21st century.

Almaz-Antey’s chief executive, Yan Novikov

Such missiles have not been produced in Russia since 1999 and the last ones were delivered to foreign customers, it said, adding that the Russian armed forces now mainly use a 9M317M warhead with the BUK system. After a company presentation translated simultaneously into three languages, he said Ukraine’s armed forces had still had nearly 1,000 such missiles in its arsenal in 2005, when it held talks with Almaz-Antey on prolonging their lifespan.

The corporation was not involved in the Malaysian Boeing catastrophe. Correspondingly, the economic sanctions applied to the corporation for that are … unjust.

Yan Novikov

Europe MH17