Largely overlooked in President Trump’s soft-pedaling this week of the Russian cyberattack on the U.S. in 2016 was a simultaneous, strange decision by the U.S. State Department to avoid criticizing Russia for the 2013 missile attack on an airliner that killed all 298 people aboard.

Every year since a Russian missile downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing mostly Dutch passengers, the U.S. State Department has issued a statement to mark the anniversary. Not this year. The fifth anniversary came on the day that Trump sided with Russian President Putin, over the U.S. intelligence community, in downplaying Russian interference in the American election.

The U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, former Michigan congressman Pete Hoekstra (pictured above, at right), wrote in a tweet on Tuesday, “Today my thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims of MH17,” according to Foreign Policy magazine. But Hoekstra, a Trump appointee and an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2010, made no mention of Russia’s role in shooting down the plane.

This year’s anniversary is particularly sensitive for the Netherlands, home of 193 victims of the airliner attack, after an investigation found clear-cut evidence that Russian military forces were responsible for attacking the plane.

Worse yet, the State Department had prepared a hard-hitting statement criticizing Putin’s Russia, but the statement was mysteriously not released.

Foreign Policy reports that the State Department’s draft statement was set to go public as early as Monday but was quashed at the last minute. Officials were told to “stand down” on releasing it because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “did not approve” the language, FP reports, based on information from one official familiar with the matter.

The proposed statement, obtained by FP, said new evidence “conclusively proves” the missile came from a specific Russian military brigade, “was brought into sovereign Ukrainian territory from Russia, was fired from Russia-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine, and (the missile battery) was then returned to Russian territory.”

Remnants of the airliner

A Dutch-led Joint investigation team found that a convoy of vehicles from the Russian armed forces transported the missile from the Russian military base across the border into eastern Ukraine. It was fired at the jet from a field held by pro-Russian separatists. It is still not yet known who specifically launched the weapon.

The planned State Department declaration said: “It is time for Russia to cease its callous disinformation campaign and fully support the next investigative phase … and the criminal prosecution of those responsible for the downing of flight MH17.”

The timing of all this is suspicious as it overlapped with Trump’s claim after completion of the Helsinki summit that Russia was not involved in manipulating the 2016 presidential election campaign, a claim that brought fbipartisan indignation across the U.S. That was followed up nearly 24 hours later by a Trump statement that walked back his prior claim, as he suggested Russia and others likely were involved.

Additional factors come into play as Trump on Tuesday suggested he might be willing to turn over former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul to the Putin regime based on wild allegations against McFaul.

The overlap again comes into play as McFaul, a Putin nemesis, on Tuesday slammed the silent treatment awarded to Russia over the airliner shootdown anniversary. After four years of State Department statements denigrating Russia over the deadly incident, McFaul told the press, the long-awaited investigation results show that “the evidence is overwhelming” in placing blame on Russia.