BRUSSELS, May 24 - A Dutch-led international team of investigators said Thursday that a missile that downed a Malaysia Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014 came from the Russian military, the Washington Post reported.

The findings are opening the possibility that Dutch prosecutors could sue the Kremlin in connection with the attack that killed all 298 on board.

The long-running inquiry already had established that a Russian-made Buk antiaircraft missile downed Flight 17, but it had not previously made a direct link to the Russian military. The Kremlin always has denied involvement in the incident.

The investigative team “has come to the conclusion that the Buk TELAR by which MH17 was downed originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade from Kursk, in the Russian Federation,” said Wilbert Paulissen, the head of the crime squad of the Dutch national police. “All of the vehicles in the convoy carrying the missile were part of the Russian armed forces.”

Criminal charges against the Russian military or Russia’s government probably would exacerbate tensions between the Kremlin and the West even further, implicating Russian officials in the deaths of European tourists on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The attack on July 17, 2014, led to a crushing round of Western sanctions against Russia.

The investigative team said Thursday that the Buk missile system was towed to Ukrainian territory shortly before the attack and towed back to Russian territory shortly afterward.

Paulissen added that the investigators possessed “legal and convincing evidence that will stand in a courtroom.”

Vladi¬mir Chizhov, Russian ambassador to the European Union, dismissed the findings Thursday, saying, “This is an old story that was thrown into the informational environment back then, in 2014,” the Interfax news agency reported.

Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam and passed over eastern Ukraine on its way to Kuala Lumpur.

Of the 298 people killed, 196 were Dutch, 42 were Malaysian, and 27 were Australian. The victims represented more than 30 nationalities, including a joint Dutch American citizen.

The investigators Thursday offered only open-source video and photographic evidence to support their conclusion that the missile came from a Russian military antiaircraft system. Portions of the evidence already had been reported by the Bellingcat research group. But the international investigative team said that its findings stood independently and that it possessed additional information to buttress its conclusions that it would announce only in eventual courtroom proceedings.

“We are entering the last phase of the investigation,” Dutch prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said. (wp/ez)