An information campaign aimed at discrediting the Donetsk People’s Republic has gained momentum in Western and Ukrainian mass media, Foreign Minister Natalya Nikonorova said.
On March 3, in the Dutch De Telegraaf newspaper, there was published an exclusive interview with the Netherlands’ Ground Forces Commander, Maarten Weijden, in which the latter accused defenders of our Republic of failure to provide assistance to the international experts who were searching for the plane wreckage and remains of the crash victims in the Flight MH 17 crash area.
According to his statement, the militia “behaved highly aggressively, demonstrating disregard for the victims of the plane crash.” In support of his contention, he referred to the statements by Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Netherlands’ then Foreign Affairs Minister Franz Timmermans, made at the UN Security Council meeting on July 21, 2014.
“In the course of the interview, it must have slipped the Dutch military commander’s mind that the Cabinet under Mark Rutte subsequently not only acknowledged all these allegations as speculation but also deplored the offensive statements addressed to local residents who had carried out reliable and quality work on collecting remains of the crash victims and dispatching them to the Netherlands. He also forgot that immediately after the plane crash, the militia unilaterally declared a ceasefire for the next three days to ensure that search works could be carried out and guaranteed security to everyone who participated in them.
It is obvious that the publication authors, in an effort to appropriately arouse public opinion in the run-up to the opening trial, were hopeful that readers would take no notice of these facts and believe the fakes disseminated by the largest Dutch newspaper. But they overreached themselves,” Nikonorova emphasized.
She also noted that Ukrainian propagandists, who are assiduously promoting hysteria around the case, had forgotten about the AFU artillery shelling of the Malaysian Boeing’s crash area due to which the evacuation launch was postponed several times, and Dutch investigators, who could only arrive at the crash site on August 6, 2014, managed to work for no more than 20 hours.
“Once again, we draw the international community’s attention to the unacceptability of such attempts to distort the truth and urge the Dutch party to cease the speculation over the Malaysian Boeing tragedy,” the Foreign Minister added.