REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, KIEV -- Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk on Tuesday said servicemen working under Russia's security services shot down the MH17 airliner over rebel territory in eastern Ukraine last year.

"I personally have no doubt that this was a planned operation of the Russian special services aimed at downing a civilian aircraft," Yatsenyuk told a televised cabinet meeting.

The missile systems could only have been operated by "trained Russian servicemen," he added.

Russia blames Ukrainian forces for downing the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on July 17 2014.

All 298 people -- most of them Dutch and including some 80 children -- died in a disaster that has seen most Western nations place the blame squarely on the militia and the alleged military backing for them from the Kremlin.

"We are certain that this (operation) was conducted from territory that was only under the Russian fighters' control," said the hawkish cabinet leader.

"And there is also no doubt that drunk separatists do not know how to use these BUK systems," Yatsenyuk said, referring to the missile believed to have blown the jet out of the sky.

"This means that these systems were operated only by trained Russian servicemen."

Russia denies any link to the insurgents and calls the Ukraine's 18-month conflict a "civil war".

The Dutch Safety Board concluded on Tuesday that the airliner was down by a Russian-made BUK missile that was fired from war-torn eastern Ukraine.

But the inquiry did not assign blame for the disaster, focussing instead on the technical details of the incident.

The head of Kiev's part of the investigation called the downing "a planned act of terror that was committed from territories not under Ukrainian control."

"This was a Russian BUK-1 missile," Deputy Prime Minister Gennadiy Zubko told reporters in Kiev.

The missile's trajectory "shows that it was designed to strike the (cockpit) pilots, making the jet's emergency landing impossible."

"Of the 8,000 pieces of shrapnel, around 700 hit the two pilots," he said.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte by phone that he hoped a separate criminal inquiry would finally draw conclusions enabling an international tribunal to prosecute the culprits in the coming months.

"Petro Poroshenko stressed that the completion and publication of the technical investigation is an important step in our search for -- and prosecution of -- all those responsible for this terrible crime," the Ukrainian president's website said in a statement.

"They agreed that the final decision about how such a mechanism is applied will be based on the results of the criminal investigation, which is being conducted jointly by Ukraine, the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia and Belgium," Poroshenko's site quoted the pro-Western leader as telling Rutte.

Ikuti Whatsapp Channel Republika