Three soldiers in a pro-Russian separatist army have been convicted of murder over the deaths of 298 people onboard flight MH17.
Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, were found guilty of 298 counts of murder and “unlawfully causing an airplane to crash” by the Hague District Court at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Fourth defendant Oleg Pulatov was acquitted after the court found he had no prior knowledge of the plan to fire the missile. Nor did he have the authority to overrule Dubinskiy’s order to find the missile, the court stated.
Compensation totalling €16m (£14m) will also be handed to victims’ family members. Prosecutors and the suspects have two weeks to file an appeal against the guilty verdicts.
Hague District Court judge Hendrik Steenhuis found that MH17 was brought down in July 2014 by a Russian Buk missile fired from a Kremlin-occupied region of eastern Ukraine.
He said early in proceedings: “The court can already declare that it takes a view that MH17 was brought down by a Buk missile launched from an agricultural field near Pervomaisk [in the Russian-held Luhansk region of Ukraine].”
The Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17 2014, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew members onboard.
The incident sparked a geopolitical fracas early in Russia’s initial invasion of eastern Ukraine, where MH17 fell.
Russia denied all responsibility, but the Dutch government holds Moscow responsible. Ukraine’s then-president Petro Poroshenko described the incident as “an act of terrorism”.
Two-thirds of passengers on the flight between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur were Dutch.
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Debris at the site of the crash of flight MH17 in which 298 people died
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Flight MH17 was destined for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but was shot down over eastern Ukraine
Even though the four men most likely thought the Boeing 777 was targeted “in error”, as they believed the plane was a military aircraft, “this does not detract from the intent” to destroy the plane and kill all onboard, the judge said.
Foreign secretary James Cleverly tweeted shortly after the verdict: “Guilty. Today’s guilty verdicts, convicting three indiuals of murder in relation to the downing of MH17, is a landmark conviction and an important step towards justice for the victims and their families.
“I would to thank the extraordinary efforts of the Dutch authorities and the Joint Investigation Team.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also wrote: “An important court decision in The Hague. The first sentences for the perpetrators of downing MH17. Punishment for all RF’s [Russia’s] atrocities then & now is inevitable.”
As the four men were not considered combatants, with the DPR is technically a non-state actor, the four were not entitled to the immunity offered to soldiers at war.
Despite the publicity of a long trial, the defendants were never likely to be imprisoned and remain at large. Three were tried in absentia and one pleaded not guilty via lawyers he hired to represent him. None attended the trial.
Also onboard MH17 were 43 Malaysian citizens, 27 Australians, a dozen Indonesians, ten Britons and residents of Belgium, Germany, Canada, New Zealand and Philippines.
Around 200 victims’ family members were present in court today, the Associated Press reported.
End of an eight-year wait for justice
The most harrowing of events ended with an outpouring of relief.
Three men, two Russians and a Ukrainian, have been found guilty of downing flight MH17 and murdering 298 people. A verdict greeted with hugs and smiles.
For the friends and relatives who had packed into the courtroom, it was the end of an eight-year wait for justice. There is virtually no chance that any of these three men will service their prison sentences – Russia will not extradite them – but at least guilt has been established.
The chairman of the panel of judges, Hendrik Steenhuis, spent nearly two hours going through the verdict. He said: “The chance of anyone aboard the aircraft surviving an attack from a Buk missile was zero.”
Some of the details were striking. Bodies were strewn over a wide area, with some victims identified only by a bone fragment. The eence that the plane was attacked using a Russian-made Buk missile was corroborated when a chunk of the missile was found inside a body.
He described information supplied by the Russian arms company Almaz-Amtey, which makes Buk systems, as subject to “fraud and misinformation”. And he said the missile system had been brought from Russia, and then hurriedly taken back to try to avoid an “international outcry”.
But for all the delight and the sense of closure, nobody was pretending that this case did not come against a backdrop of utter misery.
Robert van Heijningen, whose brother, sister-in-law and nephew were all killed, told me the attack was “an act of barbarism and I can never put it behind me”.
“It’s always in your back. I call it a stone in my heart and a stone doesn’t disappear,” he added.
Pieter Langstaat, a lawyer representing dozens of the bereaved families, said he was emotional at the verdict and praised the families for the stoicism and respect they had showed. But he was clear that the blame didn’t stop with the guilty men.
“The Russian Federation is responsible for mass murder – for killing 209 people,” he told me. “That is without a shadow of doubt.”
Anton Kotte, who lost his son, daughter-in-law and his six-year-old grandson in MH17 said: “The truth on the table – that is the most important thing.”
He added that the hearing was a “D-Day” for relatives.
Robbert van Heijningen, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and nephew, called the attack “an act of barbarism” that he could never put behind him.
“I call it a stone in my heart, and stones … don’t disappear,” van Heijningen added.
Suspicion quickly fell on fighters with the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), a separatist army in eastern Ukraine backed by the Kremlin.
It was found the missile used to shoot down the 777 was a Russian-made Buk rocket.
An earlier Dutch investigation that found the DPR was responsible.
That inquiry, which concluded its findings after five years in 2019, prompted criminal proceedings against Russian nationals Girkin, Dubinskiy and Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Kharchenko.
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A pro-Russian separatist stands at the crash site
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A local official holds an intact teddy bear which was onboard the plane
A separate investigation had found in May 2018 that the launcher used to fire the surface-to-air missile belonged to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, a unit of the Russian armed forces based in the Russian city of Kursk- with eence showing how it was moved from a Russian base across the Ukrainian border.
The team recreated the route taken by the missile convoy from Kursk into eastern Ukraine using s and images obtained using open source intelligence (OSINT).
“All the vehicles in a convoy carrying the missile were part of the Russian armed forces,” Wilbert Paulissen, one of the international investigators, told a televised news conference.
Girkin, a former FSB colonel who became a commander in the DPR, received the most attention in the trial.
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A boy stands in front of candles and flowers during a commemoration ceremony in Kuala Lumpur
‘A slap in the face for victims’ families’
Chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said in 2019 that the failure by Russia to aid the investigation that led to the charges was a “slap in the face” to the families of those who died.
“We have established that there has been involvement of the Russian Federation because they made available the missile that was used to shoot down MH17,” he said.
“The Russian Federation has not disclosed anything that happened and that is a slap in the face for all the relatives of the victims, and I call out to them to start co-operating.”
Australian Vanessa Rizk, who lost both of her parents in the crash when she was 22, said Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government were part of the “political nightmare” that led to the grief she suffered.
“I still cannot fathom that our family is caught up in a frustrating and deadly political crisis,” she said in 2021.
