Flight Mh17 disaster, the sentence: it was a Russian missile that brought down the plane and killed 298 people

Eight years after the assassination of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17in which 298 passengers and crew lost their lives, the judicial truth was established.

Judges at the District Court in The Hague ruled that the aircraft was shot down by a Buk-type missile shot from Pervomaisk, a location in Lugansk district, at the time of the shooting under the control of pro-Russian separatist militants🇧🇷 “Fragments of the Buk missile found on the victims’ bodies are irrefutable proof that it was this missile that caused the flight to crash,” the court explained, adding that Russia had, at the time of the incident, full control over the separatist DPR (People’s Republic from Donetsk).

For this disaster, the Dutch court Convicted Russian citizens Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, all judged in absentia, for having played a fundamental role in the downfall of Boeing. The three, according to the judges, played a key role in bringing the Buk-type missile system from a military base in Russia to the launch site. That’s why they went also sentenced to life imprisonment: “Only the maximum penalty is a sentence adequate to the consequences of such acts for which he condemns the three defendants to life imprisonment”. On the other hand, the fourth suspect, the Russian citizen, was exonerated due to lack of evidence. Oleg Pulatov🇧🇷 The three convicted, provides for the sentence, must jointly pay 16 million euros plus interest to surviving family members.

The plane crash 8 years ago

The tragedy occurred on Thursday, July 17, 2014. The aircraft carrier MH17, a Boeing 777 that took off from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam bound for the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by a missile while flying over Donetsk region, Ukraine, controlled at the time by Russian-backed separatists. The plane was hit while traveling at an altitude of 33,000 feet (about 10 kilometers)

All 298 people on board – 15 crew and 283 passengers of 17 nationalities – died: among them were 196 Dutch citizens.

The plane crash came as part of the civil war that broke out in Ukraine in 2014 between pro-Russian separatists and the government’s armed forces. The conflict raged mainly in Donbass and both Kiev and Western countries always believed that the Moscow-backed rebels had launched the Buk surface-to-air missile responsible for the tragedy.

Plane shot down by Russian 9M38M1 missile launched from Donbass

Russia, for its part, has repeatedly rejected this thesis, pointing the finger at the Kiev army. Not only that, Moscow has put forward a number of alternative theories suggesting the missile was launched by a Ukrainian fighter jet, and even going so far as to fabricate evidence to support this hypothesis. A team of international investigators has denied all reconstructions made by Russia and found that the plane’s disintegration in mid-air was caused by the detonation of a warhead type 9N314M Russian-made missile carried by the 9M38M1 missile, launched from eastern Ukraine using a Buk missile system.

The investigations: three Ukrainian citizens and a Russian are charged

After a long and thorough investigation into the case, prosecutors said that the defendants – Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko and Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov – played a key role in providing the missile that brought down the aircraft.

Investigators concluded that the rocket launcher used to bring down the plane belonged to the 53rd Russian Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade🇧🇷 In particular, prosecutors argued that the missile was transported to the launch site “by order and direction of the suspects”. For Dutch justice, Girkin and Dubinskiy were high-level separatist rebels at the time, while Pulatov and Kharchenko were their direct subordinates. Together, the four “are responsible for deploying the Buk chassis used to shoot down the MH17 flight,” prosecutors summarized. Pulatov was later cleared due to insufficient evidence.

For their part, the defendants’ lawyers awkwardly tried to explain that it was their intention to shoot down Ukrainian military aircraft, not civilian aircraft, and that therefore it was a dramatic fatality.

Dutch prosecutor Thijs Berger countered by explaining to the judges that it is legally completely irrelevant that the defendants wanted to shoot down military and not civil aircraft, as “from a legal point of view they were normal citizens, they could not commit any kind of violence”. 🇧🇷