It comes at a time that Russia's use of disinformation to deflect blame is under fresh scrutiny following the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal.

In September 2016 the Joint International Taskforce, comprised of investigators from several countries including Australia, reported that MH17 was shot down from pro-Russian rebel controlled territory, with a missile that had recently been transported from Russia.

Forensic examination of the wreckage showed a Buk missile had exploded close to the front of the plane, ripping it apart in mid air.

The flight crashed on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board including 38 who called Australia home.

The JIT is still working on building a criminal case against those believed responsible – reportedly including Russian military figures.

Days before the JIT released its 2016 report, in an attempt to discredit it in advance, the Russian Defence Ministry held a press conference revealing the discovery of “raw data” from 2014 from a radar station in western Russia.

The data “picked up no foreign objects near the Malaysian plane which could have caused its destruction”, a Russian radar expert said. General Andrey Koban, head of the Russian Air Forces’ radar troops, said the same radar had easily picked up a drone near the Russian-Ukrainian border – smaller than a Buk missile.

“The missile, if it was a Buk, was launched from territory under the control of the Ukrainian military,” the general said.

“Discrediting international investigation is one of the basic tactics used by pro-Kremlin disinformation."

The radar data was handed over to the JIT in August last year. At the time a Russian prosecutor-general spokesman said it “refutes the official investigators’ allegations about the missile launch site” and called it “irrefutable and impartial”.

But the JIT report, released on Tuesday, found that a supersonic Buk missile would not be visible on civil radar images, which apply filters to their data to “avoid clutter”. A drone would be picked up because it has flight properties more similar to civil air traffic.

Though the data did not show a Buk missile in the vicinity of MH17, this could be because it was too small, or removed by radar station filters, or the data “were removed manually afterwards”.

The report comes at a time Russian disinformation is under heavy scrutiny, in the wake of the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England.

“Discrediting international investigation is one of the basic tactics used by pro-Kremlin disinformation, and has been earlier utilised intensively in denigrating the Dutch-led investigation on the downing of MH17,” NATO experts at the StratCom taskforce in Europe said last week.

The disinformation campaign is still going: in mid-February Russian media repeated a claim, disproved in the JIT’s 2016 report, that MH17 was shot down by the Ukraine Air Force.

Last week the UK ambassador to Russia Dr Laurie Bristow said the Foreign Office had counted over 30 lines of disinformation regarding the attempted murder of Skripal traced back to the Russian state.

UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said Russia had responded with a “wearying barrage of lies, (a) torrent of obfuscation and intercontinental ballistic whoppers”.

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“First they told us that (toxic Soviet nerve agent) Novichok never existed, then they told us that it did exist but they had destroyed the stocks, then they claimed that the stocks had escaped to Sweden or the Czech Republic or Slovakia or the United States,” Johnson said.

“The other day they claimed that the true inventor of Novichok was Theresa May. In the last few days we have been told that Sergei Skripal took an overdose, that he attempted suicide and therefore presumably tried to take his daughter with him, that his attempted murder was revenge for Britain’s supposed poisoning of Ivan the Terrible, or that we did it to spoil the World Cup.”

He said the expulsion of Russian diplomats, by 27 countries including Australia, showed these nations “are not swallowing that nonsense any more”.