On Thursday, November 17, a Dutch court delivered its verdict over the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. The plane was blown out of the sky in July 2014 over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
Media reports say the court found three of the four main suspects in the MH17 trial guilty of murder for taking part in the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight.
Deutsche Welle (DW) says all three were sentenced to life in prison in absentia. The fourth suspect was reportedly acquitted.
Family members of people killed in the disaster gathered to hear the verdict at the high-security courtroom at Schiphol Airport where The Hague District Court sat.
The ruling is reportedly also taking place amid a tense geopolitical backdrop of Russia's full-on invasion of Ukraine, which has resulted in nine-months of war.
None of the four suspects on trial were present for the proceedings, as they had not been arrested and were being tried in their absence. This means they are unlikely to serve any time in prison.
Two of the convicted are Russian, including Igor Girkin, the former "defense minister" of the self-declared "People's Republic of Donetsk." According to DW, the 51-year-old is a former colonel in Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), and is reportedly involved in Russia's current war in Ukraine.
The second Russian convicted reportedly was one of Girkin's subordinates, Major-General Sergey Dubinsky.
The third person convicted is Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko, who allegedly led a pro-Russian rebel combat unit and took orders directly from Dubinsky.
Girkin, Dubinsky and Kharchenko were subsequently sentenced to life in prison. The men remain fugitives and are believed to be in Russia, which is unlikely to extradite them.
All three have also been ordered to pay at least €16 million ($16.5 million) to the relatives of the victims.
The fourth suspect, Russian national Oleg Pulatov, was reportedly acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
In another significant development, the judges ruled that MH17 crashed due to being hit by a Russian-made missile that was fired from a field in eastern Ukraine. The ruling confirms the findings by international investigators.
The judges further found that Russia had "control" over separatists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskiy reportedly praised the Dutch court decision as "important," but said that "the masterminds" who ordered the missile attack should also face trial.
Russia acknowledged the proceedings, with deputy head of the Foreign Ministry communications department telling reporters that Moscow would examine the court's findings. The Russian Foreign Ministry said after the verdict that it "deeply" regrets that the court "neglected principles of impartiality on MH17 case."
Russian state-run news agency TASS quoted a senior Russian legislator as saying that Russia “would not extradite citizens in absentia to the Netherlands.”
On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 set off from Amsterdam en route to Kuala Lumpur.
The Boeing 777 plane then crashed in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, amid a conflict between pro-Russia rebels and Ukrainian forces. All of the 298 people on board were killed.
The so-called Joint Investigation Team (JIT) — concluded that the aircraft was hit by an anti-aircraft missile of the Soviet-era "BUK" type.
The investigation team said the missile was launched from an area of Donbas controlled by pro-Russian rebels. The missile system had been transported to the area from Russia and was taken back over the border shortly after the disaster.
The Netherlands launched a trial in March 2020 according to its own national laws after efforts failed to launch an international tribunal to deal with the case. The majority of the victims, 193 altogether, came from the Netherlands.
