MOSCOW, July 18 (RIA Novosti) – Russia will insist on making the investigation into Thursday’s crash of a Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine as independent and transparent as possible, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.

“We will insist on [conducting] an investigation [that would be] as open [and] independent as possible,” Lavrov said in an interview with the Rossiya 24 television channel.

He said that Russia is ready “to make its contribution, but, naturally, we think that the initiative should be taken up by the government of the country where this tragedy took place.”

On Thursday, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down near the town of Torez in the Donetsk Region, there were no survivors among 295 people on board.

Ukrainian authorities and Malaysia Airlines are investigating the incident. Various international observers, including the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) and Interpol experts, also intend to join the investigation of the case.

On Friday morning, it was reported that a tripartite contact group of the representatives of the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Ukraine and Russia had held a video conference with the militia, urging them to cordon off the crash site. The OSCE reported that the militias guaranteed safety and free access to the crash site to international investigators and observers.