298 people died when passenger flight MH17 was shot down eight years ago. A Dutch court has now sentenced three of those responsible to life imprisonment. Indirectly, it also blames Vladimir Putin for the disaster.
In this Tuesday October 13, 2015 file photo the reconstructed wreckage of flight MH17 is displayed during a news conference in Gilze-Rijen, the Netherlands.
After almost three years, the first major trial of the downing of passenger flight MH17 has come to an end in the Netherlands. A court near Schiphol Airport on Thursday found three men guilty in absentia of murder on 298 counts and sentenced them to life imprisonment.
The accused are Russian-born Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky, and Ukrainian Leonid Chartschenko. A fourth suspect, the Russian Oleg Pulatow, was acquitted because it could not be proven that he was involved in the mass murder. Prosecutors had asked for the maximum sentence for all four men.
agreements with Moscow
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was shot down on July 17, 2014 while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and crashed into a field in eastern Ukraine. All 298 people on board, including 196 Dutch people, were killed. International investigators were later able to use satellite images, videos, wiretapped telephone calls and radio messages to reconstruct that it was a Russian Buk rocket that had taken the plane out of the sky.
It is not known who made the trigger at the time; but according to the findings of the investigators (which the judges agreed with) all the more who requested the missile system from Russia, who brought it to the eastern Ukrainian rebel area and who is therefore responsible for the catastrophe. The Russian Major General Sergei Dubinsky, who headed a branch of the Moscow military intelligence service GRU in the Donbass, was identified as the initiator for the shooting down.
His superior, Igor Girkin, who was the supreme military commander of the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine in spring 2014, oversaw the build-up of the military arsenal and consulted regularly with the Russian government. Kharchenko, the garrison commander, in turn acted on orders from Dubinsky. After the downing of Flight MH17, the Buk system was quickly brought back over the border to cover tracks.
A central question in the process was whether the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic was under the control of the Russian Federation at the time of the shooting down. Right at the beginning of the court hearing, the presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis stated this frankly. Moscow has constantly supplied the region with weapons, soldiers and other goods. Without having to say Vladimir Putin’s name, the court therefore also blamed the ruler in the Kremlin. It emphasized that the conflict in eastern Ukraine was not an “internal” civil war, but an armed international conflict.
The fact that the defendants believed they had shot down a Ukrainian military plane, according to wiretapped conversations, and that they accidentally hit MH17 was irrelevant to the court. Dubinski, Girkin and Chartschenko were responsible for the shooting as “functional perpetrators”, explained Steenhuis. Pulatov, another man from the secret service, did not play a coordinating role.
Pulatov was the only defendant who had been represented by lawyers at Schiphol. The four men are currently believed to be in Russia and it is unlikely that those convicted will ever serve their sentences. Russia does not recognize the court and denies any responsibility for the downing. A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry succinctly announced on Thursday that the verdict would be “studied”.
Traumatized Netherlands
For the relatives of the victims, however, the clarification of the question of guilt counts. “The world now knows who was responsible. That’s just as important to us as the actual punishment for the accused,” a spokesman for the victims’ association told Deutsche Welle. Many of the bereaved are still severely traumatized more than eight years after the accident.
The judgment is likely to have consequences for further legal disputes. More than 300 relatives of the crash victims filed a lawsuit against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights in 2020. In addition, proceedings by the Netherlands and Australia have been pending at the International Civil Aviation Organization since March. Ukraine is also taking Russia to the International Criminal Court; Kyiv now has written legal proof that Russia has controlled the separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014.
The Brussels correspondent Daniel Steinvorth Twitter follow.