Flight MH17 shot down: Three out of four accused found guilty of murdering 298 people

EA Dutch criminal court found three former senior pro-Russian separatists guilty of shooting down passenger flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298. A fourth defendant was acquitted. The court announced the verdict on Thursday in the absence of the accused, the sentence was initially pending.

Last December, prosecutors demanded that the four accused be sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. The three Russians, Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and the Ukrainian Leonid Chartschenko are responsible for the downing of the passenger plane on July 17, 2014, according to the prosecutor.

At the time, the accused held high positions with the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine: Girkin was once a Russian intelligence officer and commander of the separatists in Donbass, known as “Strelkov”. Dubinski, a former Russian officer, was Girkin’s deputy. Pulatov, in turn, was Dubinski’s assistant. Kharchenko, the Ukrainian, is said to have led a combat unit in the region.

A central question in the process was whether the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic was under the control of the Russian Federation at the time of the shooting down. The four suspects are said to have played a key role in bringing the Buk surface-to-air missile with which the plane was shot down, according to the findings of an international investigative team, to eastern Ukraine. The process has been taking place since March 2020 under high security precautions near Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, from where the Malaysia Airlines plane took off for Kuala Lumpur at the time. Most of the fatalities came from the Netherlands.

A rocket exploded on the left side of the cockpit at 3:20 p.m. a good 10 kilometers above the contested area in eastern Ukraine. Hundreds of tiny particles had pierced the plane. The court in The Hague is certain that the Buk system and the missile were brought to Ukraine from Russia and shot down from a field near the town of Pervormaisk. The launch of the rocket, according to the court, could not have happened by chance and not without technical knowledge.

Abundance of evidence from open sources

The MH17 case has also been a highly explosive political issue since the tragic July 17, 2014. Russia was not in the dock. But: “Our relatives were the first international victims of the Ukraine war,” says Piet Ploeg, who lost several relatives in the crash. The victims came from ten countries, four of them from Germany. Hundreds of relatives wanted to be present at the verdict, about 80 of them from Australia.

At that time, fighting was already raging in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass. International investigators determined that the Buk missile came from Russia and belonged to the Russian army. According to investigators, she was shot down from a field controlled by the rebels. The gun was then shipped across the border back to Russia. Moscow firmly rejects all allegations and blames Ukraine above all. The Kremlin never recognized the investigations and the court either.

A crucial question before the verdict was whether the criminal judges would follow the prosecution’s reasoning. It is clear that the four accused men did not press the button themselves. With a chain of evidence, however, the prosecutors stated that they had taken care of the procurement of the weapon and the shooting down. “According to the arguments of the prosecution, they accepted that they could also hit a civilian aircraft,” says lawyer Marieke de Hoon.

The prosecution presented a wealth of evidence, photos, videos, data, radio traffic, satellite images. But much of the evidence comes from open sources or from social media. “This digital evidence is new legal territory,” De Hoon said before the verdict. “Acknowledgment can be important for other war crimes trials.” The live stream of the verdict was broadcast in English and Russian.

More information coming soon.