What everyone knew about the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 got more official this week, as an international team of prosecutors charged three Russians and an allied Ukrainian in the murder of all 298 people aboard the plane.
Though Moscow and its puppets in occupied eastern Ukraine continue to deny everything, it was clear from the start that the missile that took out MA17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was fired from areas controlled by Russian-sponsored forces.
Officials from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine have worked together on the Joint Investigation Team since shortly after the crash, with the Dutch leading because so many of the victims were their citizens.
And the JIT now says it has proof “that Russia provided the missile launcher” and has filed charges against four figures at the heart of the transfer — all of them involved in the Moscow-created Ukrainian separatist movement. Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov all have ties to Russian military and security services; Leonid Kharchenko is the lone Ukrainian.
They’ll likely be tried (in the Netherlands) in abstentia, since Moscow will never cough them up. After all, if they started singing, it would only help show that responsibility goes all the way to the Kremlin.
We can’t say that Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin intended his pawns to shoot down a civilian airliner. But his regime sponsored a “rebellion” and armed the forces that committed this war crime.
Just one more reason the rest of the world should treat Putin as the scum that he is.