Ten years ago, when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and was shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine, the world expressed horror at the incident.
The accident occurred in the early stages of a war in which Moscow seized the Crimean peninsula from Kiev and sparked a revolt by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine’s east.
What happened?
This ill-fated flight took off from Amsterdam on a bright summer day on July 17, 2014.
The passengers included Dutch HIV/AIDS expert Joep Lange, who was travelling to a conference in Melbourne, and Jeroen and Nicole Wals and their four children, who were travelling to Malaysia for holidays.
At 4:19 pm (1319 GMT), the plane exploded in mid-air at an altitude of 33,000 feet (10.1 kilometers) as it flew over the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatist rebels are fighting the Ukrainian army.
All 298 people on board the aircraft were killed, including 196 Dutch, 43 Malaysians and 38 Australians.
A later reconstruction using some of the plane’s wreckage revealed the horror of the plane’s final moments.
“Hundreds of high-energy objects from the bomb penetrated the front of the aircraft,” the Dutch-led international investigation reported.
“As a result of the impact and subsequent explosion, the three crew members in the cockpit were killed instantly and the aircraft broke up in mid-air.”
Investigators said some passengers knew for up to 90 seconds they were going to die.
Who was held responsible?
Russia and Ukraine immediately blamed each other for the downing of the plane.
An international investigation in 2016 found “incontrovertible evidence” that the plane was shot down by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile system, which was flown from Russia into separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine.
Investigators later determined that the missile came from a Russian military brigade based in the western city of Kursk.
Russia denied that any anti-aircraft missiles had crossed the border.
In June 2019, four senior figures in eastern Ukraine’s self-proclaimed rebel Donetsk People’s Republic – Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov from Russia, and Leonid Kharchenko from Ukraine – were charged with the murder.
He was accused of bringing the missile system to a launch site in eastern Ukraine (but not of actually pressing the button).
Investigators said there were “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin had approved the supply of the missile.
Was anyone convicted?
Following a two-and-a-half-year trial, in November 2022 a Dutch court convicted Girkin, Dubinsky, and Kharchenko in absentia of murder and deliberately crashing the plane and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
All three refused to participate in legal proceedings or admit their role in the incident.
Pulatov was acquitted.
Russia rejected the court’s decision as politically motivated.
In January 2024, Girkin was sentenced to four years in prison in Russia for repeatedly criticizing the Kremlin for not launching a more aggressive offensive in Ukraine.
In 2023, MH17 crash investigators suspended their work, saying there was not enough evidence to prosecute more suspects.
Has justice been done?
The investigation against Russia is still ongoing at the International Civil Aviation Organisation, a UN agency.
The Netherlands and Ukraine have also jointly brought a case against Russia at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights.
However, hope in the Netherlands is fading that those responsible will ever be brought to justice.
“Ultimately, we couldn’t put anybody behind bars,” Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schopf told public broadcaster NOS on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the disaster.
“There is a sense of justice, but ultimately it is not what it should be,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
