Dutch court convicts 3 of murder for 2014 downing of airliner in Ukraine

A Dutch court on Thursday convicted three men with ties to the Russian security services and sentenced them to life in prison over the downing of a passenger jet above eastern Ukraine in July 2014, during a Moscow-backed separatist uprising that foreshadowed Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country. The court found that an antiaircraft missile system provided to separatist forces by the Russian military brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, commonly known as MH17, on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people aboard. The crash was by far the biggest loss of civilian life in the conflict up to that time, eliciting global outrage. Some of the victims’ families have suggested that the West’s failure to punish Moscow back then is in part responsible for the invasion of Ukraine and the Russian war crimes that have become a part of everyday life in the country today. “I’ve always said that our family members were the first non-Ukrainian people that were the victims of a war that started eight years ago,” said Piet Ploeg, the chairman of the MH17 Flight Disaster Foundation, representing most family members of the crash victims. And the fact that the convictions came only after eight years of painstaking investigation and judicial proceedings marked by Moscow’s stonewalling highlights the formidable challenges that prosecutors will face again as they try to hold more recent Russian war criminals accountable. Thursday’s verdict offered a bare measure of justice for the victims’ relatives, as the three men convicted are believed to be living in Russia or Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine, where they are unlikely to be apprehended. But the judges did clearly highlight the Kremlin’s role in the crash — it armed separatists in eastern Ukraine and instigated their uprising — and emphasized Russia’s responsibility for the tragedy against the backdrop of the current war. Story has more.<br/>