11 years later, shooting down passenger jet MH17 could finally catch up with Putin

11 years later, shooting down passenger jet MH17 could finally catch up with Putin



Posted by theipaper

3 comments

  1. For the decade after flight MH17 was shot out of the sky over Ukraine, justice proved elusive.

    As journalists investigated, then prosecutors, then a Dutch court, and, on Monday, a UN agency, steadily more fingers pointed at Russia and Vladimir Putin.

    While the new ruling doesn’t bring immediate consequences for the 2014 attack, which killed 298 people, it could still harm Putin.

    The decision, by the multinational Council of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), could darken opinions of Putin in countries where he is still admired.

    It could – one day – also lead to Russia paying out for the shootdown.

    # Massacre in the sky

    MH17, a Malaysia Airlines service from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down on 17 July, 2014, by a surface-to-air missile.

    The strike came from a Russian launcher active in eastern Ukraine, which even then was a scene of bloody fighting between Ukrainian forces and separatists supported by Moscow.

    The ruling amplifies diplomatic pressure on Russia and is notable as another Russian breach of international law, said Stephen Hall, a professor in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics at the University of Bath.

    “The fact that the international organisation that represents the world community has come out and said this, I think, does put pressure on the Kremlin at least to try and find a way around the tarnishing of its image,” Hall said.

    “It does show that even the United Nations has come out and seen from the evidence that they were able to find from MH17 that the Kremlin was behind this.”

    The Kremlin had rejected the findings of a 2022 trial in the Netherlands, was home to around 200 of the victims, that Russia was to blame.

    Hall said that “the Kremlin could hide behind the idea that the Dutch were an unfriendly country because they support Nato and support Ukraine in the war.”

    But, he said, “it’s very hard for them to be able to do the same about the United Nations, although I have already seen that they are desperately trying, claiming that the United Nations is now a servant of America.”

  3. If we really want to punish Putin we should make the skies of Ukraine safe and destroy every single GBAD deployed onto Ukrainian soil.

    However, NATO are a bunch of cowards so they won’t do this.

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