Three years to the day after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, a memorial park with 298 trees, one for each victim of the tragedy, opened on July 17 near the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
The memorial is close to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, where the 283 passengers and 15 crew members boarded the doomed flight. Three hours after the plane took off, their bodies started dropping out of the skies in the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk Oblast after MH17 was hit by a powerful Buk anti-aircraft missile fired by Russian-backed forces.
The memorial includes a steel sculpture, in the shape of an eye looking skyward, bearing the names of all of the victims, and the trees, which have been planted in a shape of a ribbon.
While the memorial aims to bring comfort to grieving relatives, the investigation into the tragedy is still underway, no suspects have been named and no trial has yet begun.
Suspects
But what is already known by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) — made up of investigators from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine — is that the missile was fired by Buk unit 332 from part of the Donbas that was under the control of Russian-backed forces. The JIT is looking for two potential suspects known by the aliases of Orion and Delfin, whose voices are heard in wire-tapped phone conversations the team has obtained.
The open-source investigation team Bellingcat has released further information in reports that indicate that the Buk unit that shot down MH17 belonged to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, based in Kursk.
On the third anniversary of the tragedy on July 17, Bellingcat issued a 73-page report on MH17 that summarizes the evidence of who was responsible for the mass murder of MH17’s passengers and crew, as well as showing how Russia has attempted to muddy the case with misinformation.
The report documents the route a military convoy including Buk 332 took from Russia’s Kursk on June 23, 2014, towards the Russia-Ukraine border, with the convoy last seen in Millerovo, Russia on June 25.
“This Buk, which was first dubbed ‘Buk 3×2’ due to an obscured digit on the side of the chassis, has many similarities with the one seen in Ukraine on July 17,” the report reads.
Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, hopes that investigators will benefit from the report.
“Our hope is the two individuals they (the joint investigation team) are interested in, known as Orion and Delfin, will now have renewed attention focused on them,” Higgins wrote in comments e-mailed to the Kyiv Post.
The main problems the investigators might face, he said, are to identify “who exactly was crewing the Buk, what orders they had, who gave them those orders, and who decided to send a Buk to Ukraine.”
Buk movement
According to the report, Buk 332 arrived in Donetsk in the morning of July 17, 2014. For six hours before the downing of MH17, Ukrainians went online to discuss a Buk missile launcher slowly creeping through eastern Ukraine.
Just after Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 left Amsterdam, the weapon was filmed heading south out of the Ukrainian, Russian-occupied town of Snizhne. From there, while loaded on a low-loader, the Buk traveled eastwards through separatist-controlled territory, and eventually reached the town of Snizhne in the early afternoon.
After arriving in Snizhne, Buk 332 was unloaded and drove under its own power southward, out of town until it arrived at a field south of Snizhne and fired the missile that resulted in the destruction of flight MH17.
Intercepts
The Bellingcat team spent nearly one-and-a-half years investigating Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, whose Buk downed MH17 in Ukraine.
“With over 200 soldiers’ social media profiles identified, it has been possible to confirm the identity and roles of many members of the 53rd Brigade and their involvement in the June 23–25 convoy that transported Buk 332 to the Russia-Ukraine border,” Bellingcat’s July 17 report reads.
The team has also identified one of the potential suspects — Sergey “Khmury” Dubinsky, a veteran of the Russian Armed Forces who served as the head of intelligence for Igor “Strelkov” Girkin’s separatist forces in 2014. Through intercepted phone calls, the report says, it is clear that Dubinsky is one of the key figures in the procurement and transport of the Buk missile launcher that downed MH17. He tells the separatist soldiers where to take the Buk and which fighters should be in the convoy with it.
A video obtained by News Corps Australia in 2015 shot by Russian-backed fighters themselves, shows them examining the site of the plane wreckage, which they initially thought was of a Ukrainian fighter jet. The video records their dismay as they minutes later discover the personal belongings of the passengers and realize that the aircraft was a commercial airliner.
“Who’s opened a corridor for them to fly over here?” one of the fighters asks on the video.
A day before the tragedy, Russia banned all civil aviation flights from its airspace adjacent to Ukraine at an altitude of 16,150 meters and below, an altitude that corresponds to the Buk missile system’s maximum firing range. It was much higher that Ukrainian airspace restriction, which was set at 9,754 meters for civilian aviation, reads the 2015 Dutch Safety Board report.
In response to Dutch inquiries, Russia said that it closed its airspace in order to coordinate with the restrictions imposed by Ukraine earlier, but failed to comment on the mismatch between the altitudes.
