On July 16 a Kyiv district court was to begin the first hearing of the suit filed by relatives of the dead crew of the Tu-154 jet downed by Ukrainian Air Defense over the Black Sea. However, the session over the suit of flight engineer Valery Laptev’s widow was immediately adjourned to September 10, 2002, due to the absence in court of a Cabinet of Ministers representative. (The cabinet, as well as the Ministry of Defense and the State Treasury of Ukraine, is a defendant in this trial.) The session was postponed until that date for two reasons: the annual vacation of the judge and failure of the Cabinet of Ministers to appoint its court representative and finalize the appropriate documents, the plaintiff’s representative, director-general of the Atlant Law Firm, Serhiy Platonov, told Interfax-Ukraine that same day.
The family of Valery Laptev, who died in the crash, is claiming UAH 1.8 million in moral damages. Moreover, according to Mr. Platonov, the lawsuit against the Ukrainian side demands that a monthly allowance be awarded to the dead fight engineer’s two underage daughters. The representative of the flight engineer’s family opined that the government and the State Treasury of Ukraine “will make every effort to keep the trial going.” He also expressed a hope that the trial would hand down a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.
According to Mr. Platonov, the firm will file more suits for material and moral damages to be paid to relatives of the crew of the Tu-154 shot down by a Ukrainian missile. Adult members of the crew families and their children could receive a $150,000 and $100,000 lump sum compensation respectively, while the monthly allowance for underage children could vary between UAH 40,000 and UAH 100,000, depending on the child’s age.
Meanwhile, on July 16, Pavel Kapchits and Boris Kalinovsky, members of a group of the dead passengers’ relatives, announced in Novosibirsk that they had already drawn up the main questions to be answered, as they think, by the Russian commission. In particular, Kapchits said it is unclear why Ukrainian Air Defense limited the exercise area radius to 70-100 km, although the S-200 missile can hit targets at up to 300 km. In addition, he says it is unclear why the missile was not destroyed in flight after it had missed its target. In Mr. Kapchits’s opinion, when the Ukrainian government commission finishes investigating the air crash and establishes to what extent the Air Defense is to be blamed for this accident, it will be necessary to solve the problem of relocating the corridors of some air flights. Mr. Kapchits also announced that the federal commission would very soon identify all the dead passengers’ and crew’s relatives to be considered as the aggrieved party. He noted that many passengers of the crashed jet had dual citizenship, so Russia’s Ministry of Justice must decide on how the Russian authorities can defend their interests.
Also on July 16, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Anatoly Zlenko, who attended the opening of a GUUAM information center in Kyiv, thus commented to the press on the trial over Olena Lapteva’s suit, “We are still holding negotiations, we have set a number of conditions to be met by the Israeli side. First of all, we want to receive the list of those entitled to compensation. We do not yet have this information. All we have are assurances that these lists are being prepared and will be handed over in time. I do not see any problems here or reasons why there should be a situation that distorts Ukraine’s position in this matter. We are prepared for cooperation: there is complete mutual understanding between us and the Israeli side over what is to be done. Incidentally, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres when visiting Ukraine expressed his absolute satisfaction with the way agreement was reached on how to compensate relatives of the Tu-154 crash victims. We have received no suits at the international level. Maybe some relatives of the dead want to be paid damages as soon as possible, so they are filing suits.”
Despite the absence of problems “at the international level,” failure to solve the problem of compensation creates a reason for calling this country’s reputation into question. Moreover, official Kyiv is still blushing from its own uncivilized behavior during the first days after the tragedy.
