MH17: The awkward truth that haunts Trump-Putin detente
However, the issue of MH-17 appears not to have been raised between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the summit in Helsinki on Monday.
The irrefutable facts are that this Malaysian B-777 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian missile on 17 July 2014, with the loss of all 298 people on board, 38 of them Australians.
The Russian President immediately after the event claimed MH17 was shot down by a Ukrainian Su-25 ground attack fighter bomber.
That is errant nonsense.
Su-25s have only small heat-seeking missiles that would have hit the engines, targeting the heat emitted by them. They would not have caused the massive front quarter proximity explosion that occurred.
Besides, the Ukrainian Su-25s, unlike the Russian ones, were not equipped with Vympel heat-seeking missiles.
Whoever launched that missile acted with reckless abandon.
The Buk surface to air missile tracking system would certainly have provided enough information to the operator that it was not a Ukrainian IL-76 military freighter.
A huge radar blip in level cruise at 33,000 feet at Mach .84 (1000km/h) is hardly likely to be a cumbersome IL-76 (as claimed by some) at Mach .74, a speed difference of nearly 120km/h.
Such a profile would not make military sense, and it is probable the Buk crew wanted it to be a military aircraft and acted in haste with insufficient assessment of the available radar information.
If, however, they fired knowing the target was a civilian airliner, then it is murder.
Justice is still denied, and it is unlikely Putin will agree to the perpetrators ever going on trial.
Byron Bailey is a former RAAF fighter pilot and flew Boeing 777s as an airline captain.
Francis remember with love, tears, applause by crowd of 250,000
Pope Francis's coffin has arrived at Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica for burial after a moving funeral, before which Donald Trump met Volodymyr Zelensky in the Vatican.
Pope Francis lies in state in St Peter’s Basilica
Tens of thousands of mourners are lining up to pay their respects to the Argentine pontiff at the start of three days of public viewing ahead of his funeral on Saturday, following a solemn procession to transfer his coffin to the basilica.
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 is front and centre news again as the presidents of the two superpowers with more than 90 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons have at least established a dialogue that is, in my mind, the most important factor to come out of the meeting.