A Dutch court on Thursday convicted two Russians and a pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist in absentia of the murders of 298 people who died in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and sentenced them to life in prison. A Russian was acquitted due to lack of evidence. Against the backdrop of geopolitical turmoil caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine this year, the court also ruled that Moscow in 2014 had full control of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine, where it said the plane attack began. Presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis said evidence presented by prosecutors in a trial that lasted more than two years proved that the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by a Buk missile fired by pro-Moscow Ukrainian fighters on July 17, 2014. crash scattered debris and bodies over farmland and sunflower fields. In the courtroom, some victims’ families fought back tears as Steenhuis emphasized how their lives were changed forever that day. Steenhuis described the agony of family members who had to wait for their relatives’ remains. “A piece of bone from an arm. A piece of leg or foot. In two cases, no part of a loved one returned.” The three men, who can appeal, did not attend their trial in a heavily guarded courtroom on the edge of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, where the doomed plane departed. Prosecutors had asked for life in prison for all four. Prosecutors and suspects have two weeks to appeal. Hundreds of family members of the people killed on the plane traveled to the court to hear the verdict, bringing them back to the airport with their loved ones who left on the fateful day MH17 was shot down. Outside the courthouse, planes could be heard taking off and landing nearby on a cold, gray day. There were fears that the weight of the evidence was impressive but would not necessarily lead to convictions. Steenhuis, however, reported extremely detailed evidence showing where the Buk was fired from, the burns it left on a field and how it moved across eastern Ukraine. He also went into deep detail about the roles of the suspects. “There is ample evidence” to support the theory that the missile was fired from the field into rebel-held territory, Steenhuis said. “There is no reasonable doubt,” he added, rejecting defense arguments that something might have happened on the plane. The court ruled that the three men — Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian separatist Leonid Kharchenko — worked together to bring the Buk missile system from a Russian military base in Ukraine and position it for launch. And even if the downing of MH17 may have amounted to a military error, Steenhuis said “such a mistake did not change the intent.” Relatives said the verdict shows who was responsible for all the deaths on the plane. “The truth on the table — that’s the most important thing,” said Anton Kotte, who lost his son, daughter-in-law and 6-year-old grandson when MH17 was shot down. He said the hearing was a “D-Day” for the relatives. Robert van Heyningen, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and nephew, called the shooting an “act of brutality” that he could never put behind him, regardless of the verdict. “I call it a stone in my heart and stones … do not disappear,” he said. The highest-ranking official to be convicted was Girkin, a 51-year-old former colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. At the time of the downing, he was the defense minister and commander of the armed forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic — the region in Ukraine where the plane was shot down. Girkin is reportedly currently involved in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Girkin’s subordinates, Dubinsky and Kharchenko — a Ukrainian who prosecutors say commanded a pro-Russian rebel combat unit and took orders directly from Dubinsky — were also convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Russian Oleg Pulatov, the only suspect represented by defense lawyers at the trial, was acquitted. In a videotape played in court, Pulatov insisted he was innocent and told jurors: “What’s important to me is that the truth comes out. It’s important to me that my country is not blamed for this tragedy.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the MH17 court ruling was a vital first step in assigning responsibility for the crime, but added that more prosecutions and convictions were needed. “It is an important decision at the court in The Hague… It is necessary that those who ordered it are also in the dock, because impunity leads to new crimes,” he tweeted. A Russian spokesman said Russia was not yet ready to comment on the MH17 convictions. “We will study this decision. In all these questions, every nuance makes sense, so after studying this court document, we will be ready to comment on it,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ivan Nechaev said.
