Seven years after the downing, over Donbass, of the Boeing-777 plane that was performing the MH-17 flight, the Russia media resumes a series of narratives meant to exonerate the rebels who launched the Russian rocket. The main thesis is that Ukraine is responsible for the tragedy, but the West has sought to hide its guilt.
NEWS: “A forensic investigator asked the Americans in 2020 to provide satellite images, but was turned down. To a repeated request sent on March 4, 2021, the answer was similar. As a result, the court abandoned other attempts to obtain from US authorities satellite images related to the crash of the MH-17 plane.
Moscow, unlike Washington and Kiev, handed over to investigators the data recorded by Russian radars when the Malaysian airliner crashed.
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Ukraine, as previously reported by Prosecutor Theis Berger, provided information only from secondary radars, i.e. those that record only civilian aircraft in the sky and send a signal to the ground
[…] At the time of the tragedy, the flight was being controlled by the Ukrainian radar and air defense systems and by Ukrainian dispatchers. The Ukrainian side provided confusing statements.
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However, the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation recorded the activity of the Ukrainian ground surveillance services on July 17, 2014.
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They are now trying to delay a decision at any cost, and if Ukraine suddenly disappears from the political map, this tragedy will be completely forgotten”.
NARRATIVES: 1. Ukraine is to blame for the downing of the MH-17 flight, but the Western states are doing their best to hide this fact. Moscow has presented all the evidence showing it had nothing to do with the downing of the plane, which Kiev and Washington have not done.
LOCAL CONTEXT / ETHOS: The Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down on 17 July 2014 in the separatist-controlled territory in the Donetsk region. All 298 people on board were killed. Most of the dead (196 people) were Dutch citizens. A joint international investigation involving representatives of the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine concluded that the plane was shot down by a Russian-made Buk missile belonging to the 53rd Air Defense Brigade of the Russian Armed Forces in Kursk, near the border with Ukraine.
The four defendants, three Russian citizens and one Ukrainian, are being tried in absentia, because none of them intend to take part in the trial. It is believed that the suspects were part of the command chain of the pro-Russian rebels and played an important role in transporting and supervising the missile launcher. Moscow has always denied any involvement in the downing of the MH-17.
Since 2014, Russia has launched a series of false narratives about the downing of this plane. According to one version, the Ukrainian army fired at the plane, assuming that President Vladimir Putin was on board. In Moscow, they specified that the rocket was part of the 9M38 production series with which a military unit from the Ternopil region in Ukraine had been equipped. Russia also presented a film in 2018 in which Russian military claim that the images with the “Buk” missile system were edited. Thus, the representatives of Moscow accuse Ukraine of involvement in the downing of the plane and of falsifying the evidence.
PURPOSE: The purpose of these narratives is to blame Ukraine and the West for the downing of the aircraft.
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: In reality, Russia's theories about the involvement of Ukraine / the West in the downing of the aircraft were investigated by the international team, but also by prosecutors in the Netherlands. More than 50 investigators were involved and several important witnesses testified. The defendants, who are on Russian soil or in the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, controlled by Moscow, have not given any statements and will not appear before the court. The Russian government press writes that the process is intentionally delayed to hide Ukraine’s guilt. In fact, two years ago, Dutch Chief Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said the trial was hampered by the fact that the investigation area in eastern Ukraine was inaccessible to the investigative team, as fighting took place between Russian-funded mercenaries and the Ukrainian army. Also, in the meantime, a number of pieces of evidence may have been destroyed.
In 2015, the independent investigation group Bellingcat analyzed images from the report drawn up by the Russian Ministry of Defense after the downing of flight MH17 - and the conclusions show that it was a fake. According to the Moscow version, the aircraft with 298 people on board was hit by the missiles of a Ukrainian fighter plane or by one of Kiev’s anti-aircraft battery. British analysts, and then the investigation team, concluded that satellite images used by the Russians as evidence to prove the guilt of the Ukrainians had been altered. Specifically, the Moscow Ministry of Defense allegedly “blurred” certain details and used images from June 2014 - that is, a month before the aircraft was shot down.
According to evidence presented at the trial in the Netherlands, the plane was shot down exactly seven years ago by a Russian Buk rocket, brought from Russian territory, which was launched from an area controlled by the pro-Russian separatist rebels in Donbass.
The narrative about the US’s refusal to present satellite images is also false. In reality, Washington made available to the experts part of the investigation team and the Court all the requested evidence, which proves Russia's guilt. The statement of the Russian officials about the evidence provided by Moscow being ignored is also false. In fact, on March 9, 2020, the Dutch prosecutor's office released a report analyzing all the alternative explanations for the downing of the plane. In the absence of any real evidence, those assumptions were rejected.
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