MH17 downed by warhead fired in Ukraine, but Russia and West still at odds over who pulled the trigger
The Dutch Safety Board announced its findings Tuesday that a Buk missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in mid-2014.
But the final report isn’t expected to bring closure: Russia and the West will continue to wrangle over who is to blame.
In its announcement, the board noted that Ukraine should have closed off its airspace to civilian aircraft and said that the Boeing 777, carrying 298 people, should not have been flying over a war zone.
On July 17, 2014, the Malaysian jetliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur broke apart, felled by a missile, over southeast Ukraine, where pro-government and separatist fighters were locked in bloody fighting.
Western officials and experts blamed separatist forces, who they said were being aided by the Russian military.
Russia responded by blaming the West, saying that Ukraine’s army may have shot down the plane and Ukraine’s government was complicit in the passengers’ deaths for allowing a jetliner to fly through a war zone.
Tuesday’s report by the Dutch Safety Board said that the plane was downed by a Buk SA-11 surface-to-air missile. This will discredit one Russian theory, that the passenger plane was shot down by a Ukrainian air force jet. But both the Russian and Ukrainian armies have Buk missile systems, and Russian officials can and probably will continue to argue that the Ukrainian army was behind the attack on the plane.
To further prove that point, the Russian weapons manufacturer Almaz-Antey has reportedly even blown up a decommissioned Boeing 777 using a Buk missile in a controlled experiment. The goal of the experiment was to show that only the antiquated version of the Buk missile used by Ukraine, and not the modern version used by the Russian military, could have caused the damage done to MH17.
Earlier, the company had complained that its expertise was not being considered by Dutch investigators.
Tuesday’s report is the first official finding by Dutch investigators since they announced that MH17 had been penetrated by "a large number of high-energy objects", indicating shrapnel from a missile, in September 2014. A Dutch broadcaster, NOS, citing a Ukrainian official earlier attached to the investigation, said that pieces of shrapnel from a Buk missile had been found in the bodies of the passengers.
The Dutch Safety Board’s goal was to answer what, and not who, caused the crash. It was also charged with answering why civilian planes were flying over the conflict area, where separatist forces had brought down more than a dozen Ukrainian aircraft and helicopters in the weeks before the MH17 crash.
A Dutch police investigation, which is expected to finger a culprit, is also underway. Investigators released an appeal for witnesses who saw a Buk missile system being hauled on a trailer in separatist-held Ukraine shortly before and after the attack on MH17. The video said that a missile fired from separatist-held territory was the "main version of the investigation," although others are being considered.
The video’s version of events relied heavily on two sources: open-source imagery of a Buk system in separatist-held Ukraine, much of which has been compiled here by the amateur investigative Web site Bellingcat, and audio from tapped telephone conversations between separatist fighters released by the Ukrainian government. The Russian government television station RT (formerly Russia Today) released reports last week attacking Bellingcat and the open source evidence that separatist forces had a Buk missile system.
Dutch investigators face one other hurdle: finding a venue to bring the accused to justice. In July, Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have established an international criminal tribunal to investigate the MH17 attack. Russian U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin said his country vetoed the resolution because it was politically motivated. Australia, Belgium, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Ukraine may set up an independent tribunal instead, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said last month.
