MH17 Investigators charge four over 2014 downing of airliner

The international team investigating the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine leveled murder charges against three Russians and a Ukrainian that it said were responsible for shooting down the aircraft.

Almost five years after 298 people died when a Russian-made surface-to-air missile detonated just feet from the Boeing 777 at cruising altitude, the Joint Investigation Team said that it will prosecute Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, and Oleg Pulatov as well as Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.

The four men “formed a chain linking the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with the Russian Federation,” according to a presentation by the investigation team to reporters yesterday in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. The team played an excerpt from a telephone intercept that it said showed Kremlin official Vladislav Surkov pledging military support to a separatist leader shortly before the disaster.

International arrest warrants will be issued and proceedings are due to commence at a special criminal court in the Netherlands on March 9, the investigation team said. The Russians are currently in Russia and the Ukrainian suspect is believed to be in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic held by separatists in eastern Ukraine, the team said.

The identification of suspects for the first time in the inquiry came more than a year after the investigators said they had found proof the BUK missile that downed the plane on July 17, 2014 belonged to a Russia- based military unit, the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade in Kursk. That conclusion led the Netherlands and Australia to say they hold Russia responsible for its role in the crash. Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected those accusations.

Ukraine, the U.S. and the European Union accuse Russia of backing separatists in eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed 13,000 people in the past five years. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the conflict, which erupted after the 2014 revolution in Ukraine that ousted the country’s pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Girkin denied responsibility and said separatist “militia” were not involved in downing MH17, the Interfax news service reported.

Dubinskiy was identified in Wednesday’s presentation as “employed by the GRU” military intelligence service of Russia. The investigation team, which urged the authorities in Moscow to apprehend and question the suspects, said Russia has refused to confirm this or to cooperate with the inquiry since the disaster occurred.

Russia “hasn’t disclosed anything about what happened, and that’s a slap in the face of all relatives of the victims and the bereaved,” Fred Westerbeke, the chief public prosecutor in the Netherlands, who’s the JIT’s coordinator, told reporters.

“We now have the information, the proof, that the Russian Federation is involved in this tragedy, in this crime, one way or the other,” he said. “One day after July 17, they could have been in the position to tell us exactly what happened, because they know.”

Before the report was released, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on whether Russia would hand over any of its citizens if they were named as suspects. “You know our position on this investigation. Russia did not have the opportunity to participate,” he told reporters on a conference call.

The investigation said it would continue to probe the BUK missile crew as well as the chain of command in Russia. The Russian government said last year in response to the allegation that its military wasn’t involved in the crash and that Russia never sent missiles to Ukrainian territory, according to an Interfax report that cited the Defense Ministry in Moscow.

Most of the victims of the flight en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were Dutch citizens, making it a sensitive topic in the Netherlands and prompting King Willem-Alexander to say the MH17 crash remains an “open wound” in Dutch society.

The five countries working together in the investigation – Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine – in July of 2017 picked the Netherlands as the country where suspects will be prosecuted. Joost Akkermans & Wout Vergauwen, Bloomberg