The Netherlands and Australia have officially accused Russia of being responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in 2014.
All 298 people on board were killed when the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 passenger jet, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, crashed near the Russian-held town of Grabove in Donetsk Oblast.
Investigators have since established that the aircraft was shot down with a Buk anti-air missile system amid heavy fighting in the region. On May 24, the official inquiry by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) consisting of the Netherlands, Ukraine, Malaysia, Belgium, and Australia, concluded that the jet had been downed by a Buk system that belonged to Russia’s 53rd Air Defense Brigade, which is based in Kursk.
The investigation also confirmed that the Buk system was transported to the Donbas from Russia, and that the jet was downed from the Kremlin-occupied territory with a missile produced in 1986 that had belonged to the Russian army’s weapons stocks.
“On the basis of the (JIT’s) conclusions, the Netherlands and Australia are now convinced that Russia is responsible for the deployment of the Buk installation that was used to down MH17,” Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok said on May 25.
“The government is now taking the next step by formally holding Russia accountable.”
He nevertheless admitted that holding Russia to account for the crime would be “a complex legal process,” and also added that the case could be taken to an international court.
“We call on Russia to accept its responsibility and cooperate fully with the process to establish the truth and achieve justice for the victims of flight MH17 and their next of kin,” Blok said.
So far, the official added, Russia had totally failed to cooperate with the international investigation into the case.
Later in the day, Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop said that Russia should pay compensation to the families of the 38 Australian nationals killed in the MH17 atrocity.
She also added that the families of victims were seeking for Russia to be held to account.
“They want to see closure, but they also deserve justice, and we will be seeking reparations for the atrocities caused by this conduct,” Bishop said.
Later, Bellingcat, a civilian investigative journalism network, said during a press conference in The Hague, the Netherlands on May 25 that it had identified a key suspect in the MH17 case sought by JIT investigators. They said they had conclusively identified a person who went by the call sign “Orion,” whose voice is heard in phone calls intercepted by Ukraine’s SBU security service, as an officer of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service named Oleg Ivannikov.
The Bellingcat investigation was conducted jointly with Russian journalists from the Insider media outlet.
According to the Bellingcat, Ivannikov, who was serving undercover in the Russian-occupied part of Luhansk Oblast when MH17 was shot down, “coordinated and supervised the military activities of Russian militants, pro-Russian separatists, and private army contingents.”
Ivannikov also supervised the procurement and transport of weapons across the Russia-Ukraine border, the group said, adding that the JIT investigation earlier knew him only by his codename “Orion” and the fake name and patronymic “Andrey Ivanovich.”
On July 14, 2014, in a phone call with Oleg Bugrov, then a “deputy defense minister” of the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic,” Ivannikov told that “in a couple of days” Russian-led forces would get a Buk missile system to defend against Ukrainian warplanes.
Three days later, the Russian 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade’s Buk launcher number 332, which had been transported to Ukraine from Kursk, downed MH17 , Belligcat said.
Bellingcat said it had established that before his deployment to the Donbas in 2014, Ivannikov served as the “defense minister” of South Ossetia – a part of Georgia that has been occupied by Russia since the Russian-Georgian war in 2008.
In February 2017, Belligcat also identified a retired Russian officer, Sergei Dubinskiy, as been one of those directly responsible for transporting the Buk missile unit from the military base in Kursk to the occupied Donbas and back again in July 2014.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overwhelming evidence presented the official investigation, Russia has continued to deny its involvement in the atrocity, accusing Ukraine of downing the Boeing plane with one of its own Buk missile systems.
Since the day of MH17’s downing, the Kremlin has spread numerous competing versions of events, many of them absurd or obviously untrue, via its state-controlled media. In one case, it accused a Ukrainian SU-25 pilot, Vyacheskav Voloshyn, of downing the Boeing during a combat sortie. The Russian side even presented an obviously forged satellite picture of an SU-25 targeting the Boeing in the air as “evidence.”
The international investigation into the downing of MH17 has since established that that and other Russian versions of events are false.
On May 25, Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov repeatedly rejected the JIT’s official conclusion, claiming a lack of evidence, as did the Russian defense ministry. Russian President Vladimir Putin also commented later in the day.
“To acknowledge what’s written there, we must have full participation in the inquiry,” Putin said. “The Ukrainian party works there, even though Ukraine violated international rules and failed to close the airspace in the combat zone.”
In turn, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on May 24 that Ukraine will do “everything possible to ensure that Russia’s activities as a state sponsor of terrorism are treated appropriately at the United Nations International Court of Justice.”
