MH17 tragedy

On July 17, it was the 10th anniversary of the MH17 tragedy – the destruction of the Boeing 777 airliner by Russian terrorists over Donbas.

On that day in 2014, at 12:14 local time, this aircraft of the Malaysian airline Malaysia Airlines left the tarmac of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. It belonged to the family of the world's largest twin-engine aircraft and was far from new – it had been in service for 17 years. However, its crew, led by Captain Eugene Leong, had no doubts about the reliability of their aircraft.

At 12:31, the Boeing took off and set course for Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. On board were 283 passengers and 15 crew members. At that time, no one could have known that they had less than three hours to live.

Communication with the aircraft was lost over Ukraine, at approximately 16:20 Kyiv time. Its remains fell near the village of Hrabove, near the city of Torez in the Donetsk region. In an instant, 298 people died, including 80 children. Most of them were citizens of the Netherlands, Malaysia, and Australia.

Almost immediately, the so-called "Minister of Defense of the DPR" Igor Girkin posted that a Ukrainian military transport An-26 had been shot down. Shortly thereafter, this news was repeated by the Russian TV channel LifeNews, and other propaganda media picked it up.

But within an hour or two, the terrible truth became known – a passenger airliner had been shot down! And then the Russian media quickly forgot about the An-26 and instead stood in defense of the terrorists. The information space began to be flooded with one absurdity after another. For example, late in the evening of July 17, a post by a certain "Spanish air traffic controller" from Kyiv appeared on the Russia Today website, stating that a few minutes before the tragedy, Ukrainian Air Force planes were spotted near the Boeing. This "sensation" was quickly spread by other media. But when it turned out to be fake, it was also quickly forgotten. The "dispatcher" turned out to be an international swindler. This Jose Carlos Barrios Sanchez later claimed that Russia Today paid him almost $50,000 for that post.

At the same time, more and more real evidence was emerging that convinced that almost three hundred human souls had become victims of a missile from the Buk air defense system launched from territory controlled by pro-Russian militants. The investigation into the circumstances of the disaster conducted by the international group Bellingcat received significant publicity worldwide. It was based on a painstaking analysis of a huge array of open-source data, which convincingly proved Russia's involvement in the destruction of the Malaysian Boeing.

The official investigation was conducted by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT). It also published several reports. In particular, on May 24, 2018, at a press conference in the Netherlands, its representative confirmed that the airliner was shot down by a Buk missile. It belonged to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian army from Kursk. The route by which the system was brought to the territory controlled by separatists was traced. Fragments of that missile were displayed.

At the beginning of 2020, the Dutch Prosecutor's Office charged four suspects in the MH17 case. They were: Russian citizens Sergey Dubinsky (call sign Khmuriy), Igor Girkin (call sign Strelkov), Oleg Pulatov (call sign Gyurza), and Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko (call sign Krot).

In March of that year, the trial in the MH17 case began in the District Court of The Hague. The court received a huge amount of photo, video, and audio evidence, expert opinions, and numerous witness testimonies. Various versions were considered, including Ukraine's involvement in the downing of the Boeing. Thus, on June 9, 2021, the court rejected the version of the missile launch from a zone controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The accused could not be brought to The Hague, and the trial was conducted in absentia. On November 17, 2022, the court found Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko guilty and declared that only life imprisonment would be sufficient punishment for them. However, the legal battle is far from over and seems to drag on for years. Eventually, justice will prevail. As the well-known Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov aptly noted: "Russia will be held accountable as a terrorist state. Vladimir Putin will go down in history, just like Muammar Gaddafi, as a man whose decisions led to the deaths of innocent people, and a passenger plane was shot down."