For Piet Ploeg, it has been a decade of mourning and efforts to punish the perpetrators, but the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is “something one can never get over.”
Ploeg’s brother, sister-in-law, and nephew were among the 298 people aboard MH17 when a Russian missile hit the airliner and brought it down on July 17, 2014, drawing global attention to what was then a three-month-old war in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, between Russia-backed fighters and Kyiv’s forces.
Russia was quick to deny its role in the downing of the Boeing 777 and launched a major disinformation campaign, but journalists and open-source sleuths poked massive holes in Moscow’s arguments. In 2016, international investigators concluded that MH17 was shot down by a missile fired from a Russian Buk launcher, which was brought into territory held by anti-Kyiv forces and spirited back across the border into Russia shortly afterward.
With the 10-year-old war raging after the full-scale invasion in February 2022, claiming tens of thousands of new victims and further undermining international order, the downing of MH17 is “a warning more relevant than ever,” Hyunduz Mamedov, a former deputy prosecutor-general who represented Ukraine on the Dutch-led Joint Investigative Team (JIT) that investigated the tragedy, told RFE/RL.
In November 2022, a court in the Netherlands convicted two former Russian intelligence agents and a pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist leader of murder for their roles and sentenced them, in absentia, to life in prison. The fourth defendant, a Russian who was the only suspect represented by defense lawyers at the trial, was acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
The probe did not establish exactly who fired the missile. That is “an unanswered question that hinders the grieving,” Ploeg, chairman of the MH17 Disaster Foundation, which represents families of victims, told RFE/RL.
In February 2023, prosecutor Digna van Boetzelaer said the investigation was ending despite “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally involved -- that he “decided on supplying the Buk” to the Russia-backed forces in the Donbas.
“For years we have been trying to demonstrate the Kremlin's effective control and responsibility in this case,” Mamedov said. “The reluctance of our partners to qualify Russia's hybrid aggression as a war against Ukraine ended only after...Putin launched the full-scale invasion.”
Both Mamedov and Ploeg are pinning high hopes on the cases brought against Russia by Ukraine and the Netherlands at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
In January 2023, the Strasbourg-based court said the cases over alleged human rights violations in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine and the shooting down of flight MH17 are “admissible,” signaling that it believes Russia can be held liable for rights violations in the Donbas.
Another legal avenue to hold Russia accountable is a case at the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in which Ukraine has accused Russia of violating an anti-terrorism treaty by funding anti-Kyiv forces in Ukraine. But Mamedov considers it less promising.
The top UN court, also in January 2023, found that Russia violated elements of a UN anti-terrorism treaty, but declined to rule on allegations that it was responsible for the shooting down of MH17, stating that violations of law against funding terrorism only applied to monetary and financial support, not to supplying weapons or training.
“The international community must punish the perpetrators, from the person who pushed the button to the person who bears ultimate responsibility,” Mamedov told RFE/RL.
As the war persists, many Ukrainians and backers of Ukraine are anxious not only about its course but also about the chances of holding Russia responsible for a lengthening list of alleged war crimes.
“The case of MH17 is proof that unpunished evil returns in many times greater magnitudes,” Roman Lyubiy, a Ukrainian film director and creator of Iron Butterflies, which the Berlinale festival called a “sober yet poetic” documentary about MH17, told RFE/RL.
The 2023 film combines archival footage and interviews with video art and performance to draw parallels between past and present.
“Back in 2014 the whole world learned about the war in Ukraine, but we were not able to control the narrative about it,” Lyubiy said. “We need to change that if we want to see Russia facing its own Nuremberg trial in the future.”
On July 8, nine days before the 10th anniversary of the downing of MH17, a Russian missile struck a major children’s hospital in Kyiv, killing two people and wounding more than 50, including children.
“Russia again showed its ruthless face of a state that does not care about human rights and is indifferent to truth,” Ploeg said following the attack.
He is not sure its victims will see justice.
“Through the last decade, I learned that the international law is quite clear, it is international politics that are making things difficult,” he said.
