After three days of marathon indictment, it is by the applause of relatives of victims of the MH17 crash that the team of prosecutors was welcomed, in a small room adjoining the courtroom of the court of Schiphol, in the Netherlands. Low, Wednesday December 22. The prosecution has just requested four life sentences against the three Russian defendants and their Ukrainian sidekick, for firing a surface-to-air missile at the Malaysian Airlines aircraft on July 17, 2014, and the murder. of its 298 passengers. According to the prosecutor Thijs Berger, the separatist leaders of Donbass would have wanted to target the planes of the Ukrainian air force. But for Thijs Berger, “It does not matter that they did not intend [d’abattre le MH17], or whether it is negligence ”, the four accused deserve life imprisonment.
Opened in March 2020, the trial is in its final stage. In March 2022, the defense of Oleg Poulatov will plead in turn. The former battalion chief is the only one to have appointed lawyers to represent him. And like him, neither Sergei Dubinsky, nor Igor Guirkine, two former Russian military intelligence officers (GRU), nor even the Ukrainian Leonid Khartchenko have been extradited to the Netherlands.
Russia has always denied its support for the Donbass separatists, opposed since 2014 to Ukrainian power. In the MH17 case, the prosecutor is formal and the evidence convincing: the murder weapon, a BUK missile, came from a Russian military base near Ukraine. In the last months preceding the prosecutor’s indictment, delivered from December 20 to 22, the investigating judge called for the hearing of Sergei Mutskayev, the commander of the 53e Kursk anti-aircraft brigade. But in early December, Moscow replied that such an interrogation would harm the country’s vital interests.
The last stand of a call for witnesses
However, if he considers that he has well targeted the four key perpetrators of the case, the prosecutor nevertheless still wonders about the origin of the decision to provide the separatists with the murder weapon, the anti-aircraft defense system that they demanded. In September, the Dutch police addressed, in a press release, to the inhabitants of the garrison town of Kursk: “We would like to know who, within the 53e anti-aircraft brigade made the decision to send a BUK missile system to Ukraine? “, can we read in the letter. And if the person in charge was part of the team that transported the missile and its launcher to Ukraine on July 16, 2014, or if he was “Higher in the hierarchy” ? A call for witnesses, like a last-ditch of the public prosecutor’s office which, after seven years of investigation, has not obtained the answer. The hearing of the commander of the Kursk base is not the only refusal by Moscow to the prosecutor, who has never been able to interrogate Igor Guirkin and Sergei Dubinsky.
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