Amsterdam - Four fugitive suspects go on
trial in the Netherlands on Monday charged with the murder of
298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 which
was shot down with a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine
in July 2014.
Wreckage of the Boeing 777 fell to the ground in fields
surrounding the Ukrainian village of Hrabove in territory held
by pro-Russian separatists fighting Ukrainian government forces.
The jet was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it
was hit by a surface-to-air missile. There were no survivors.
Arrest warrants were issued last year for three Russians and
a Ukrainian who were identified by a Dutch-led Joint
Investigation Team (JIT) which spent several years collecting
evidence to identify those behind the attack.
The four, Russians Sergey Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Igor
Girkin, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, had senior positions in
the pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine in 2014. The JIT
said they had not pulled the trigger, but colluded to carry out
the attack.
Girkin, a vocal and battle-hardened Russian nationalist,
was minister of defence in the self-declared Donetsk People’s
Republic (DNR) in Ukraine. Dubinsky, Pulatov and Kharchenko were
members of the separatists’ military intelligence unit.
The defendants are at large and are not expected to show up
for the hearings at a high-security courtroom near Amsterdam's
Schiphol airport where they will be prosecuted under Dutch law.
If they don't appear, or fail to send lawyers, the judges
could rule that the trial be held in absentia.
In addition to charges for the deaths, they also face
preliminary allegations of obtaining a missile launcher with the
intent to bring down an aircraft.
Russia has consistently denied any involvement or providing
financial or military support to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said
the Kremlin would wait to see how the trial panned out before
commenting, but added that Russia had always had doubts about
the objectivity of the Dutch-led investigation.
The JIT includes judicial authorities from Australia,
Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine, in addition to Dutch police and
prosecutors.
The aircraft's downing led to sanctions against Moscow by
the European Union. It also heightened political tension between
Russia and Western powers who blame it for the disaster, which
killed 193 Dutch, 43 Malaysian and 27 Australian nationals,
among others.
The largest criminal investigation in Dutch history
painstakingly reconstructed the events leading up to and on July
17, 2014. Police and prosecutors examined tens of thousands of
pieces of evidence, including videos, communication taps,
satellite imagery, photos and social media posts.
Among the evidence are images plotting the missile
launcher's journey as it crossed into Ukraine ahead of the
disaster. A reconstruction presented by prosecutors showed it
returning to Russia a day later with one fewer missiles.
Intercepts released in November by the JIT showed that two
of the suspects had been in contact with Vladislav Surkov, a
senior Putin aide, and Sergey Aksyonov, a Russian-appointed
leader in Russian-annexed Crimea., it said.
The communications between the DNR militant leaders and
Russian government officials "raise questions about their
possible involvement in the deployment of the (missile), which
brought down flight MH17", the JIT said.
Two weeks have been scheduled for the first proceedings,
which could be largely procedural. The trial is expected to run
through 2020 and may be longer in the event of delays.
The JIT concluded in May 2018 that the missile launcher
"that took down flight MH17 belonged to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft
Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation". It was based at the
Kursk military base, just across the Ukrainian border, it said.
The Russian Defence Ministry said at the time that “not a
single air defence missile launcher of the Russian Armed Forces
has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border”.