In view of what is happening in Aleppo today, it is as well to remind ourselves of the horrific destruction by a Russian missile of a Malaysian aircraft over eastern Ukraine with almost three hundred people on board on July 17, 2014.
A joint investigation team, under the leadership of the Netherlands, and made up of prosecutors from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and the Ukraine presented their preliminary report in September. The team had spent the last two years amassing evidence from witnesses to this disaster.
They visited the crash site and examined tonnes of items retrieved from it, including passenger belongings and human remains. It is the most comprehensive international investigation into the catastrophe to date, and one which has yet to be finalised.
The team of investigators has concluded that a Russian missile, which was used to shoot down the Malaysia Airways MH17 flight from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia from a field held by Ukrainian Russian-supported rebels, was shipped across the border with Russia hours before the attack and driven back quickly into Russia – with one of its four missiles missing - after the shooting down of the airline.
The team of investigators provided extensive evidence of the journey that the heavy Buk missile took when travelling in and out of Russia by reconstructing the weapon’s journey using data from mobile phones, as well as photographs and videos showing it being escorted by pro-Russian rebels. The investigation pin-pointed the exact location from which it was fired killing all 298 passengers and crew aboard the flight.
The joint investigation team also identified 100 people who were “linked to the crash or the transportation of the Buk missile”, an advanced mobile, medium-range, surface-to-air air defence missile system capable of shooting down cruise missiles. They did not name the 100 individual suspects. But they stressed that those that they had identified “played an active role in getting hold of the missile and in organising the transport to the launch site”. They do not yet know the names of the individuals who fired the weapon at the Boeing 777.
In their presentation of the findings, the prosecutors played videos and displayed photographs taken by local inhabitants in the area where the aircraft came down, showing the tracked missile launcher being carried in a Volvo low-loader truck through Ukraine to the field from where it was launched 13 miles from the crash site.
The truck was accompanied by two unmarked military vehicles and men in unidentifiable uniforms. Intercepted mobile phone calls and witness accounts pinpointed its movements that day from the Russian border through Donetsk, Torez, Snizhe and on to the launch site in the hours before the aircraft was destroyed.
The prosecutors presented photographs showing a white trail of smoke that the missile left in the sky as it sped on its destructive path to the airliner.
The Russian authorities have been determined to fight the conclusion that they were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the 298 deaths
Shortly after MH17’s disappearance an internet post, attributed to the Ukrainian separatist leader, Igor Girkin, a Russian Army veteran, claimed rebels had shot down a Ukrainian military transport aircraft. In several tapped phone calls, men’s voices can be heard discussing the transport of the Buk missile system from Russia and back again, while audio previously released by Ukrainian officials appears to show a distraught Russian-backed Ukrainian rebel saying that the MH17 was shot down in the mistaken belief it was a military aircraft.
The photographs also included the burnt patch of stubble measuring about 30 metres square, which could also be seen on satellite images showing caterpillar tracks nearby in the field that had been set alight by the firing of the missile. The launch site was pinpointed by many witnesses to a field on top of a hill in farmland near the village of Pervomaiskyi, which was then held by Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels.
The unequivocal preliminary conclusion of the chief Dutch police investigator is that: “Based on the criminal investigation, we have concluded that Flight MH17 was destroyed by a Buk missile of the 9M83 series that came from the territory of the Russian Federation.”
Experts have speculated from the outset that the Ukrainian rebels would have required Russian personnel to handle the sophisticated missile system. Russia has always denied that its forces have played any role in Ukraine, though it is known that Russian Special Forces have been active in the territory without national identification and using unmarked vehicles ever since the start of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, which provides in-depth intelligence on global military and commercial defence activities, Russia has just three hundred of these Buk missile launchers, all of which are kept in secure compounds. The weapons system can only be operated by professional artillerymen. Something as sophisticated as the Buk takes months of training and is not the sort of weapon anybody could just take over and fire.
Evidence produced by the international joint investigation team has prompted calls for Russia to face a formal war crimes investigation over its involvement in the tragic loss of lives. While the proof of what happened that July day two years ago is not yet incontrovertible, the weight of evidence adduced by the joint investigation team points ineluctably to Russian involvement.
Nevertheless, from the moment the aircraft was destroyed, the Russian authorities have been determined to fight the conclusion that they were responsible, directly or indirectly, for the 298 deaths.
The Russians have directly contradicted what has been called the ‘Bellingcat’ version of events. Bellingcat is a website operated by a British blogger who, within a week of the disaster, had begun the task of using maps, contemporary social media conversations by witnesses and photographs to establish, through a process known as ‘geolocation’, that a Russian Buk missile had driven through the area where the launch had been detected.
There were some figures in the West, from veteran Australian journalist John Pilger to John Helmer, the West’s longest serving foreign correspondent in Russia, who needed little prompting from the Russians to conclude that all was not what it seemed.
We have known for some time that some western commentators prefer Putin to our flawed leaders. It is an area on which the left and the right overlap, from Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Stop the War’ movement to Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
More than one observer has noticed that the use of selective, mostly conspiracy theory websites, act as a system for blurring the truth. Often, they are views designed not to convince of an alternative, but simply to disrupt and to sow doubts (in Russian dezinformatsiya).
Social media is awash with comments that the evidence against Russia about the shooting down of MH17 does not stand up. Just as they said about Assad’s chemical attacks in Syria a year before the destruction of MH17. And as the Russian ambassador to Malta said about the destruction of Aleppo three weeks ago.
The Putin regime indulges in a sustained programme of disinformation through its official broadcasters and a plethora of websites and social media accounts around the world. If you are someone who automatically believes that the West is responsible for all the ills of the world, then the Kremlin will help confirm that bias.