New investigation into MH17 disaster blames Russian military for downing plane over Ukraine

A group of open-source investigative journalists have released a report into the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine that largely assigns responsibility for the missile attack to a Russian military unit and its chain of command - extending all the way to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The report, published on the site Bellingcat, tracks the movement of Russia’s 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade and its three battalions during the summer of 2014. Using social media posts, open-source imagery and various other reporting, Bellingcat’s team managed to trace the movement of a specific Buk surface-to-air missile system - of the type that shot down MH17 - to the border of Russia and Ukraine.

While previous Bellingcat reports also identified the Buk system, this most recent iteration manages to point to many of the soldiers allegedly involved and the officers that, Bellingcat believes, authorised the movement of the Buk and bear responsibility for the eventual shoot down of MH17, even if the Buk was fired by separatists.

“Although it is likely that the head officials of Russia’s Ministry of [Defence] did not explicitly decide to send a Buk missile launcher to Ukraine, the decision to send military equipment (with or without crew) from the Air [Defence] Forces to Ukraine was likely made at a very high level and, therefore, the Russian Ministry of [Defence] bears the main responsibility for the downing of MH17,” the report concluded.

On July 17 2014, the Boeing 777 loaded with almost 300 passengers and crew was on a routine flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was struck by a surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine. Everyone aboard was killed.

But heavy fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists around the crash site, lack of satellite imagery and little initial concrete evidence helped create a maelstrom of half-baked theories that took months to dispel.