MH17: A warning shot from Putin that the West ignored
A decade after a Malaysia Airlines flight was downed over Ukraine, military figures rue missed chances to stem Russian aggression and victims’ families still wait for justice.
The teenage girls who ran for their lives from a cafe as Russian missiles landed nearby on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) would have been small children when the sounds of war first came to their home.
In the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin’s troops arrived a decade ago in unmarked uniforms and under the thin disguise of a local insurrection.
Tuesday’s salvo was over for the girls before they could even reach a bomb shelter, but they escaped unscathed. They were too young to remember July 17, 2014, when a Boeing 777 fell out of the air in flames, brought down by one of the first Russian missiles fired over the Donbas.
The 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, hit at 30,000ft (9100m) as it travelled through Ukrainian airspace from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, were all killed.
Eighty of them were children. The youngest victim, Kaela Goes, was 21 months old.
Bodies dropped out of the air on to sunflower fields torn up by tank tracks. One fell through a villager’s roof. Intimate belongings from the victims’ luggage were scattered over 20 square miles (51sq km) to be looted by soldiers under Russian command.
The mass murder of European citizens should have hardened the West’s response to persistent Russian aggression, pre-empting President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion with sweeping sanctions and increasing military aid to Ukraine, according to NATO and Ukrainian officers who served at the time.
The population of Ukraine’s eastern region are still paying the price for the world’s failure to respond to the shooting down of MH17, or to even earlier provocations by the Kremlin.
“The first mistake the West made was in not responding to the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. Of course, in 2014, there was a second stage: Crimea and Donbas,” Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Dubey said this week.
He has been fighting the Russians in the Donbas since 2014 and remembers the horror of discovering that a civilian passenger plane had been shot down, as well as the scenes of mixed-up human remains in the chaos of the crash site, some from small children. “For a moment after MH17 it seemed like even the Russians were scared – they realised that they had crossed beyond all moral boundaries,” Dubey said.
The Kremlin swiftly began a disinformation campaign, offering a series of improbable explanations to claim that Ukraine had brought down MH17, even though a Russian commander, Igor Girkin, had bragged that his men had downed a plane he believed to have been a Ukrainian military troop transport.
“Then they calmly lied through it and the world let them move on,” Dubey said. “If the West had wanted to support democratic nations, it should have provided us with more military aid. We would have stopped the Russians when they started this invasion.”
A smattering of sanctions were introduced immediately after the crash but the world’s politicians, in thrall to Russian oil and gas money, largely abdicated responsibility in favour of the slow and ineffective grinding of the wheels of the international justice system.
Commemorations were held for the victims Tuesday, but 10 years after the catastrophe none of the families have received justice. A joint investigation into the incident by Ukraine, the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Malaysia established that a Russian Buk anti-aircraft system had shot the plane down from occupied territory. It had been transported into Ukraine by members of Russia’s 53rd Air Defence Brigade, posted near the border.
Girkin, another Russian commander and one local man were convicted and sentenced in absentia to life in prison for their roles in the massacre. As they are in Russia, however, they are unlikely to ever serve their sentences.
Girkin has since been jailed after accusing Putin of “cowardly mediocrity” and describing him as a “nonentity.” He was sentenced in January to four years on charges of “extremism”.
The joint investigation closed last year. The Russian soldiers suspected to have launched the missile and their more senior commanders, including Putin, will never be held to account.
The joint investigation team is bound not to disclose all the evidence it has received. “We have a lot of information in our materials that indicates important data of other persons before this tragedy, but it is not enough to bring them to justice,” Oleksandr Bannyk, Ukraine’s prosecutor at The Hague, said.
“We cannot disclose specific names and specific information, taking into account the fact that any persons involved are considered innocent until proven guilty in court.”
In a civil claim filed against Russia by several of the victims’ families, the American attorney Jerry Skinner sought $US10m compensation for each victim, the same amount awarded to families of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing by Libya. To date, the families who filed the claims have received only $US100,000, from the airline.
Skinner argues that frozen Russian assets should be used to compensate the victims’ families. He accuses the Netherlands of putting its own claim for damages – mainly costs incurred during the recovery of bodies and its investigation – ahead of those of the families. He said the European court has refused to file his pleadings.
Today Dubey’s troops, from Ukraine’s 32nd Mechanised Brigade, are clinging on to defensive lines around the besieged city of Toretsk, the new focus of the Russian offensive. A decade after it was liberated from Putin’s proxy forces in the Donbas, it looks as if it is about to be occupied again.
General Ben Hodges, commander of the US army in Europe in 2014, also believes that the West might have reacted more forcefully to the downing of MH17, by imposing crippling sanctions and increasing military aid to Ukraine as it battled Putin’s original hybrid invasion of the Donbas.
“This war in Ukraine is what failed deterrence looks like,” said Hodges. The mistakes of President Obama’s administration a decade ago were being repeated by Biden, his former vice-president, he added.
“Our continued failure to respond to Russian aggression is why we are where we are.”
The Times
More Coverage
Microplastics found in human brain for first time
The tiny pieces of plastic are found everywhere, including the human body, but until now have not been found to have reached the brain.
Australian author Charlotte Wood makes the strongest Booker Prize shortlist in years
Stone Yard Devotional is among the six impressive nominees up for the UK’s biggest literary prize.