Netherlands protests ‘despicable’ Russian response to MH17 verdict

AMSTERDAM – The Dutch government said on Friday it had summoned the Russian ambassador in the Netherlands over what it called Moscow’s “utterly despicable” response to the verdict in the trial over the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

Russia said on Thursday the Dutch court’s decision to convict two former Russian intelligence agents and a Ukrainian separatist leader for shooting down the plane “neglected impartiality”. All 298 people aboard were killed.

Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said these remarks by Russia, which invaded Ukraine nine months ago, were “utterly despicable” and totally removed from reality.

“Russia itself violates international laws in every way. We can’t let this pass... and have to show that we do respect the rule of law and do have an independent judiciary,” Mr Hoekstra told Dutch newspaper AD.

MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, as fighting raged between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces, the precursor of this year’s conflict.

In its ruling, the court said there was no doubt the plane had been downed by a Russian missile system, and that Russia had “overall control” over the separatist forces in the region from mid-May 2014. 

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob on Friday said the country supported the court’s decision to sentence the three suspects to life in prison. The three were also ordered to pay at least €16 million (S$22.7 million) in compensation to relatives of the victims.

The crash was 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 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 who were the victims of a war that started eight years ago,” said Mr Piet Ploeg, chair of the MH17 Flight Disaster Foundation, representing most of the family members of the crash victims.

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 emphasised Russia’s responsibility for the tragedy against the backdrop of the current war.

The judges found two Russians – Igor Girkin, a former colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service, and Sergei Dubinsky, a former Russian military intelligence officer – guilty of murder and downing a plane.

A Ukrainian citizen, Leonid Kharchenko, who led a Russian-backed separatist military unit, was also convicted of the same charges.

A fourth defendant, Oleg Pulatov, also a former Russian military intelligence officer, was acquitted because he was considered insufficiently involved in the episode.

REUTERS, NYTIMES