The Pavlenko & Poberezhnyuk Law Group, which is representing the interests of Russia's S7 Airlines in a lawsuit against the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the State Treasury of Ukraine regarding compensation of $15.32 million worth of damages in connection with the crash of a Tu-154 passenger aircraft in 2001, on Thursday challenged the decisions of the lower courts at the Supreme Court of Ukraine.

The group told Interfax-Ukraine that after judicial reform in Ukraine, according to the Economic Procedure Code, such a complaint was filed to the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine, which rejected the airline's cassation appeal on December 11 and which currently has the power to decide whether it is necessary to transfer the case to the Supreme Court.

"We are forced to undergo this procedure in Ukraine, although we don't have high hopes for it. Therefore, we submitted an application on the revision to the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine that will hardly recognize the illegality of its decision. Current events in the Ukrainian judicial system, regardless of the case, give more grounds to believe that the system has completely discredited itself," said the airline's representative in court, Oleksandra Pavlenko.

The group noted that the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine had upheld the ruling of Kyiv's Economic Court of Appeals of May 28, 2012 and the decision of the Economic Court of Kyiv of September 6, 2011, which refused to satisfy the airline's lawsuit.

In 2003-2005, the Ukrainian government paid $15.6 million in compensation to the relatives of those who died. In 2004, S7 Airlines brought a suit at Kyiv's Economic Court against the Defense Ministry of Ukraine and the State Treasury Ukraine seeking compensation for damages due to the crash of the Tu-154.

According to the conclusions of an examination held in 2008-2010 by the Kyiv Institute of Scientific Research and Forensic Examination, the Tu-154 couldn't have been brought down by a Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile in 2001.

As the defense of the plaintiff reported, the members of the expert commission of Kyiv Institute of Scientific Research and Forensic Examination did not have experience in investigating plane crashes, three of them were not forensic experts, but employees of Kharkiv Aviation University, which is under the control of the Defense Ministry.

The plaintiff sought to involve in the consideration of the case experts from the Interstate Aviation Commission as a third party, who conducted an investigation and determined a hit by a missile. The airlines also submitted a lot of applications for important data from the General Prosecutor's Office and the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, as well as by Russian agencies, research institutes, manufacturers of aircraft and the missile involved in the case, etc.

All of the claims were rejected by the court in September 2011.