A life sentence was requested on Wednesday by Dutch prosecutors against the four men prosecuted for the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash over eastern Ukraine in 2014, accusing them of the murder of 298 people in his edge.
The Russians Sergei Dubinsky, Igor Guirkin and Oleg Poulatov, as well as the Ukrainian Leonid Khartchenko, four senior officers of the pro-Russian separatists from eastern Ukraine, are accused of having shot down an MH17 flight with a surface-to-air missile ” BUK ”.
A central role in the routing of an anti-aircraft battery
“We demand that the suspects Guirkin, Dubinsky, Poulatov and Khartchenko, each for their responsibility in the crash of a plane which caused the death and murder of 298 people, be sentenced to life imprisonment”, told the judges prosecutor Manon Ridderbeks.
Prosecutors said the four suspects played a central role in delivering a BUK anti-aircraft battery, presumably intended to strike a Ukrainian warplane. “If this was their intention, it does not change the accusation of making it a criminal act,” prosecutors said. Dutch law “does not distinguish between military and civilian aircraft. Any violence against aviation must be severely punished, ”they stressed.
“Aim to destroy an airplane”
The best known of the suspects, Igor Guirkin, 49, nicknamed “Strelkov” (“Gunner”), was one of the main separatist commanders at the start of the conflict with the Ukrainian army five years ago, and probably their most media representative at the time. Sergei Dubinsky, 57, is said to be linked to Russian military intelligence. Oleg Poulatov, 53, is a former member of the Russian special forces and deputy to Sergei Dubinsky.
Leonid Khartchenko, 48, is said to have led a separatist unit in eastern Ukraine. “The suspects used the ‘BUK’ missile as their own weapon,” said prosecutor Thijs Berger. In hearings this week, Thijs Berger said that the men on trial “did not press the button themselves, but (…) used it in their armed struggle with the aim of destroying a plane”.
Russo-Western tensions
None of the suspects made it to the trial, which started in March 2020 in the Netherlands. Only Oleg Poulatov is represented by lawyers. The hearings come against a backdrop of growing Russian-Western tensions around Ukraine. Americans and Europeans accuse Moscow of preparing a military offensive there. Kiev has been fighting a pro-Moscow insurgency in two breakaway regions bordering Russia since 2014, when the Kremlin annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Our dossier on MH17
An international team of investigators says the plane was shot down over the area of armed conflict with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine by a missile brought from a Russian military base, possibly in order to fight against Ukrainian forces. Moscow has always denied any involvement. The verdict of the Schiphol court, near Amsterdam and located a stone’s throw from the airport from where the tragically fated Boeing took off, is not expected before the end of 2022.