A Dutch criminal court has 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 afternoon in the absence of the defendants.
The court has also confirmed the course of events: the passenger plane with flight number MH17 and 298 people on board was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, according to Dutch judges, with a Russian “Buk” anti-aircraft missile. The rocket was fired from a field in an area controlled by separatists. When the verdict was announced in the criminal trial against four people who were allegedly mainly responsible for the shooting down, the Dutch court confirmed investigations by international investigators for the first time on Thursday afternoon.
The anti-aircraft gun was therefore brought from a Russian military base to Ukraine and returned after it was shot down. Four former senior separatists have been charged with 298 counts of murder – three Russians and one Ukrainian. All four are believed to be in Russia. Only one had been represented in court by lawyers. The criminal judges read the verdict in the high-security court at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in the absence of the accused.
The court also noted that as of May 2014, the conflict region in eastern Ukraine and the rebels were effectively under Russian control. Russia has so far denied any responsibility. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down over a contested area in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board were killed. Since most of them came from the Netherlands, the trial also takes place there.
International investigations brought findings
The accused had denied their guilt, and the Kremlin had also rejected the participation of Russian citizens and accused the judiciary of “unfounded allegations”. The pronouncement of the verdict takes place without their presence. “The country must not extradite its own citizens,” says Marieke de Hoon, a lecturer in international criminal law at the University of Amsterdam. Because all attempts to bring the case before an international court had failed because of the Kremlin’s resistance, the only option left for the Netherlands was to open criminal proceedings against these men at home.
The 298 victims came from ten different countries, four of them from Germany. The relatives of the victims are traumatized, but not only they: in the Netherlands, the shooting down of the plane and the denial of the Kremlin triggered a collective trauma and strained the relations between the countries even before the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. The question of what role Russia played in the accident is therefore particularly important to the relatives.
Intensive work was done to clarify the case. An international team of investigators carried out extensive forensic investigations until it was clear: the missile that hit the plane was fired by a Buk-M1 Telar anti-aircraft system. It came from Russia’s 53rd Air Defense Brigade in Kursk, Russia, near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne, where fierce fighting was going on at the time.