Hague Letter: MH17 families hurt by Russian insensitivity

It was just what relatives of the 298 passengers and crew who died on board Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 did not need to hear. Days before Christmas, the Russian ambassador to Kuala Lumpur decided to cast doubt on the integrity of the Dutch-led international investigation.

Diplomatic relations between Russia and the Netherlands have been strained for more than a year following the storming of the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise, the arrest of a Russian diplomat in The Hague, and an assault on a Dutch diplomat in Moscow – and they have just become significantly worse.

It is worth remembering that men, women and children of 10 nationalities died when the Boeing 777 was shot down over eastern Ukraine: 193 Dutch, 43 Malaysians, 27 Australians, 12 Indonesians, 10 British, four Germans, four Belgians, three Filipinos, one New Zealander and one Canadian.

In some cases, entire families – a Malaysian family of six, for instance, and two Dutch families from the same street – were wiped out. This has been the first Christmas their loved ones have spent without them, husbands without wives, parents without children, grandparents left alone.

Such an appalling human catastrophe was inevitably controversial from the start. Reviving cold-war hostilities, the West, including the US and Germany, accused Russian-backed separatists of blowing the airliner out of the sky – while Russia says a missile fired by a Ukrainian air force jet was to blame.

Satellite photograph

As if those accusations and counter-accusations were not enough, Russia then released a satellite photograph purporting to show the Ukrainian jet that fired the fatal missile – leading to accusations that it was a crudely edited forgery, and in the words of the US State Department, "preposterous".

It also emerged that one Australian passenger had been conscious long enough to place his oxygen mask around his neck – raising terrible questions about just how quickly the end came.

Throughout the summer, the Netherlands watched in silence as the remains of those who died were repatriated via “the Kharkiv air bridge” to be pieced together by forensic pathologists. Two hundred and ninety-four have now been identified as a result of that painstaking work.

Four of the dead remain unidentified. All four are Dutch, that much is clear. The Department of Justice says some traces may yet be found among body parts in Hilversum – although it is possible their remains were not recovered from the crash site.

At the same time, the wreckage of the airliner was finally returned to the Netherlands early in December, and the long process now begins of trying to reconstruct it as much as possible on a specially constructed airframe to see if it yields any fresh secrets.

Undiplomatic That is the grim context in which ambassador Lyudmila Vorobyeva made her comments, widely regarded in the Netherlands as undiplomatic, perhaps even mischievous, but certainly insensitive – playing to the concerns of some of the relatives about the length of time the investigation is taking.

Pointing out that five months has passed, Ms Vorobyeva, whose posting to Malaysia ends in January, said: “The question is why it is being conducted in such a slow manner. According to many experts, it is very easy to identify what kind of weapon was used to shoot down the aircraft.”

Although the Dutch have promised a final report by mid-2015, the ambassador said she believed it would not, in fact, be published until the following year, which she said was “too long” and could lead to manipulation – though by whom, or of what kind, was left unspecified.

She claimed that rather than finding Ukraine responsible, the international inquiry was being "soft-pedalled", in violation, she alleged, of UN Security Council resolution 2166, which set it up four days after the crash, and in contravention of the rules of the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

She recalled – accurately – that in 2001, it took Kiev eight days of prevarication to finally admit what Moscow already knew: that Ukraine had mistakenly used an anti-aircraft missile during a military exercise to shoot down a Russian airliner over the Black Sea, killing all 78 passengers and crew.

Whatever the ambassador’s motives, what the MH17 relatives certainly do not need as they approach 2015 with gaping holes in their lives is to add conspiracy theories to the burden of their grief.

The human approach just days before Christmas would have been to commiserate with the living that such a tragedy should befall them, rather than to make it worse.