Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday welcomed a Dutch court conviction of three men over the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014.
Dutch judges on Thursday handed down life sentences in absentia to two Russian men and a Ukrainian man for their role in the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew, including 38 Australians.
“We welcome The Hague District Court finding of three men being guilty of murder over the downing of MH17,” Albanese told a news conference on the sidelines of an APEC summit in Bangkok. “We’ve gone through this legal and court processes, and we call upon Russia to hand over for justice the people who are involved in this and who’ve been found to be guilty in absentia.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
The Malaysian airliner departed from Amsterdam and was bound for Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, as fighting raged between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces.
The ruling came as a relief to relatives of those who died, with more than 200 relatives attending the trial in The Hague, wiping away tears as the judgement was read.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
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