Six years ago, on July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), a Boeing 777 carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members, was shot down by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile that was fired from Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko, in those initial days, said, “I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act.” Mr. Poroshenko invited Dutch experts to assist in the investigation that included the International Civil Aviation Organization and other international experts.
The commercial airliner was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur, and even from the preliminary information available at the time, Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry advisor Anton Herashchenko said that a missile was used to down the plane. Andrei Purgin, a self-styled first vice-premier of the so-called Donetsk “people’s republic,” claimed that the separatists did not possess weapons capable of reaching targets at an altitude above 10,000 meters.
The attack on MH17 was the third such event involving military hardware and airplanes over Ukrainian airspace since the conflict erupted in the Donbas. It followed the downing of two jets belonging to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, an Antonov AN-26 and a Sukhoi SU-25, which were claimed to be shot down by the Russia-controlled militants.
Social media posts by the militants claimed, soon after the downing of MH17, that the insurgents had shot down an aircraft. Igor Girkin, a suspected Russian military intelligence officer and retired colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate (known by its Russian acronym GRU), wrote via Vkontakte: “In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying somewhere in the Progress Mine. We have issued warnings not to fly in our airspace. We have video confirming. The bird fell on a waste heap. Residential areas were not hit. Civilians were not injured.”
On July 14 of that year, the U.S. State Department released a fact sheet that stated Washington had “no evidence that Russia’s support for the separatists has ceased.” The statement continued, “In fact, we assess that Russia continues to provide them with heavy weapons, other military equipment and financing, and continues to allow militants to enter Ukraine freely.”
The investigation has now led to a trial for the suspected perpetrators, who have been identified as Sergei Dubinsky of Russia, Mr. Girkin, Leonid Kharchenko of Ukraine and Oleg Pulatov of Russia. The suspects are being tried in absentia, and Mr. Pulatov is the only suspect being represented by lawyers, as the other suspects have not sent any representation. A judge in the case accepted a defense request to investigate alternative theories of the terrorist act.
On July 3 of this year, the court in The Hague ordered that defense lawyers and experts be granted access to the remains of the wreckage that are being held at a Dutch military base, The trial is to resume on August 31. Moscow continues to deny any involvement in the terrorist act, and international investigators have rejected Russia-proposed explanations.
Source: “Malaysian airliner down in Ukraine,” (Agence France-Presse, The New York Times, RFE/RL), The Ukrainian Weekly, July 20, 2014.