A Dutch court has convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian national, who commanded pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, of murder in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in 2014, in which all 298 passengers and crew on board were killed.
A Dutch court has convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian national, who commanded pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, of murder in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in 2014, in which all 298 passengers and crew on board were killed.
The conviction of the defendants, including two Russian military intelligence officers, implicates the Russian government, which long denied responsibility and refused to extradite the defendants.
A third Russian defendant was acquitted.
None of the defendants attended the trial. Those convicted face potential sentences of up to life in prison, though they may never be captured.
The verdict draws a line under a years-long investigation into who fired a Buk surface-to-air missile that hit the Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, leaving bodies and wreckage scattered across fields in eastern Ukraine.
The incident happened during fighting between Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in an area where several Ukrainian military jets were shot down in the weeks preceding the destruction of MH17.
Russia has long maintained it was not a party to the conflict that unfolded in 2014 and that it did not control pro-Russian fighters in Donetsk, where the four defendants held senior positions as part of the separatist militias.
The Kremlin always adamantly denied any involvement in the MH17 downing and sought to smear the probe as politically biased, promoting various explanations for how the plane was shot down, from blaming the Ukrainian government to dismissing the evidence in the case as fabricated.
