Ukraine to use all international legal means to bring Putin to justice over MH17

KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine will use all international legal mechanisms to try to bring Russian President Vladimir Putin to justice for the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over east Ukraine in 2014, Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said on Wednesday.

“The difficulty of obtaining evidence and functional immunity do not allow prosecuting the president of the RF (Russian Federation) in national courts,” Kostin wrote on Twitter. “We will seek to employ all the existing international legal mechanisms to bring him to justice.”

International prosecutors said they had found “strong indications” that Putin approved the use in Ukraine of a Russian missile system that shot down MH17, but that evidence of his involvement was not concrete enough to lead to a criminal conviction.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)