Eight years after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over the sunflower fields of eastern Ukraine, three men – two Russians and a Ukrainian – have been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the mass murder of all 298 passengers and crew.
Watched by scores of the relatives of those who died, the verdicts were handed down on Thursday afternoon by judges at the high-security Schiphol judicial complex, at the end of a landmark 69-day trial described as “the most complex criminal case ever heard in the Netherlands”.
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, responding to the life terms, said the sentences were “an important decision”, but warned that those behind the attack had to end up in the dock if there was an be an end to impunity for Russian atrocities “then and now”.
In a judgment that lasted just under two hours, the three judges said the Boeing passenger jet, cruising at 33,000ft from Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, and full to capacity mainly with holidaymakers, was blown out of the sky by a Russian-made Buk missile.
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That missile, said presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis, was fired from farmland near the town of Pervomaiskyi where it was “controlled by pro-Russian fighters” – the latter characterisation one of many disputed since by Moscow, which claims that Ukrainian soldiers were solely responsible.
The three men convicted were Igor Girkin, a former colonel with the Russian intelligence service, FSB, and self-styled defence minister of the pro-Russian breakaway, Donetsk People’s Republic; Sergey Dubinskiy, formerly of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and deputy to Girkin; and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, who oversaw the operation of the Buk on Dubinskiy’s instructions.
A fourth man, Oleg Pulatov, another Russian described as a former special forces soldier with the GRU’s Spetsnaz unit, was acquitted.
Mr Pulatov was also the only one of the four defendants to have accepted legal representation by a team of Dutch lawyers and pleaded not guilty, on the grounds, he claimed, that he had no involvement.
Judge Steenhuis said the court believed Mr Pulatov had known about the presence of the Buk missile but acquitted him on all charges on the grounds that there was inadequate evidence that he’d been “a co-perpetrator” of the attack with the other three.
Telephone intercepts played an important role in the evidence against the three men found guilty, suggesting they believed they were targeting a Ukrainian fighter jet.
While that “counted for something”, the judge noted, in terms of lessening their criminal responsibility, they had still had “murderous intent” and the consequences of their actions had been enormous.
After almost two hours of tension, families of the bereaved stood hugging, weeping and wiping away tears as the judge handed down the three life terms with the words: “Only the most severe punishment is fitting for those who have caused such suffering to so many victims and their surviving relatives.”
In Moscow on Thursday evening, foreign ministry deputy spokesman, Ivan Nechaev, said the Kremlin would examine the court’s findings “because in all these issues nuance always matters”.
