The Russian foreign minister, Sergej Lavrov, claimed that the MH17 investigation was anything but transparent. The Americans still had not revealed their satellite footage and images. The Russians wondered why. What was on those images that no one was allowed to see? Could they prove the presence of Ukrainian planes nearby at the time when the disaster happened, just as Moscow was claiming? The Russian state network Channel One aired footage from the country’s own satellite, showing a Ukrainian jet fighter following the aeroplane and firing a rocket at it. Russian media and officials accused Ukrainian Captain Vladyslav Voloshyn, an Su-25 attack jet pilot, of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines flight.
This ‘evidence’ immediately came under scrutiny. Among other things, the letters on the hull of the plane being shot at did not match with MH17, and the date of the footage proved that it had been taken before 17 July. Ultimately the Russians were accused of producing false satellite imagery.
By now Moscow had become very sceptical about the DSB investigations and accused the Western investigators of being biased. Keeping the Russians on board was a painstaking task for Joustra. Russia could walk away from the investigating table at any moment and reject the conclusions established by the DSB board. Without the Russians on board, any attempt to bring possible Russian perpetrators to justice would be destined to fail. But working together with the Russians had proved to be very disillusioning. Once the DSB presented its final report, Moscow would surely reject any conclusions. The diplomatic tension between Russia, Australia and the Netherlands had reached boiling point.
In the meantime, victims’ families from Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia went to the European Court of Human Rights to sue President Vladimir Putin and Russia for $10 million each. Russia again denied any accountability. The compensation claim was filed with the Strasbourg-based court by Sydney legal firm LHD Lawyers, who alleged that Russia had worked to keep its involvement hidden.
All through 2015 the DSB forensics experts had been working hard at piecing together large parts of the cockpit and hull of MH17. The reconstruction hadn’t been easy. It was a meticulous process with thousands of parts recovered from the retrieval efforts in Ukraine shipped to the hangar. The forensic researchers at Gilze-Rijen Air Base had to search through a proverbial haystack of wreckage parts.
An outline of the aircraft had first been drawn on the floor of a hangar at Gilze-Rijen and pieces of wreckage placed on or near the outline, where it was thought they belonged. Positioned on the floor, the pieces resembled a giant jigsaw puzzle with just the image on the box to help find the places where they fitted. Eventually the parts were transferred onto a black skeletal three-dimensional frame, where the pieces of wreckage were held in place. Because many parts of the wreckage were badly mangled, the frame was slightly bigger than the original model of a Boeing 777-200. Some parts had to be twisted back into shape and wrapped over the frame.
The assembled reconstruction clearly showed the damage and impact the plane had been subjected to. It also showed from which direction the impact had come, slightly to the left just above the cockpit, and how the plane had fallen to earth in separate parts.
It was October 2015 and the DSB was ready to present its final report. Not only had it become evident that the plane had been struck by a missile, but the forensics had found fragments in the body parts of the cockpit crew members that backed this assumption. More than a hundred objects were found in the body of one of the flight attendants and literally hundreds of metal fragments were found in the dispersed body of one of the captains. The fragments all pointed in one direction: ‘Based upon the damage examination it is concluded that the impact damage on the wreckage of flight MH17 is caused by a warhead with various types of preformed fragments in the 6–14mm size range, including one type with a bowtie shape detonating to the left of, and above, the cockpit.’
The report stated that the front of the aircraft was destroyed by a missile, killing two of the pilots and a flight attendant instantly, and causing the rest of the plane to break apart. Bow-tie-shaped fragments in the debris and traces of paint were crucial in determining the precise model of warhead involved.
‘The damage observed on the wreckage is not consistent with the damage caused by the warhead of an air-to-air missile in use in the region in amount of damage, type of damage and type of fragments. The high-energy object damage on the wreckage of flight MH17 is therefore not caused by an air-to-air missile.’
The report concluded that MH17 was shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile, which exploded less than a metre from the cockpit. The report named the missile used as a 9N314M warhead as carried on a 9M38-series missile and launched by a Buk surface-to-air missile system.
‘Of the investigated warheads only the 9N314M contains the unique bowtie shaped fragments found in the wreckage. The damage observed on the wreckage in amount of damage, type of damage, boundary and impact angles of damage, number and density of hits, size of penetrations and bowtie fragments found in the wreckage, is consistent with the damage caused by the 9N314M warhead used in the 9M38 and 9M38M1 BUK surface-to-air missile.’
The Russian government immediately challenged the finding that a Buk missile shot down the plane. The DSB noted Russia’s objections, but issued a point-by-point rebuttal.
Days after the report was presented, former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych suddenly surfaced again. The former president, who now lived in Russia, was going to take Ukraine to court for violating his human rights, he told the press. Ukraine had ‘repeatedly breached his human rights’, denying his right to a fair trial and the right ‘not to be discriminated against because of his political status and opinions’.
In November 2014 the surviving relatives of the victims formed the MH17 Disaster Foundation to commemorate the victims and guard the interests, in the broadest sense, of the surviving relatives. In a statement they let the press know that: ‘After a period of disbelief, pain, sadness and mourning all surviving relatives have been able to say goodbye to their loved ones. Now that the investigation of the DSB (OVV) has come to an end and we know what has happened we feel the emphasis must shift to locating and prosecuting the guilty.’
Despite a truce intended to last through the holiday season, Ukraine and pro-Russian rebel forces continued hostilities in December 2015. The village of Zaitseve was the centre of the fighting, which claimed the life of a soldier and a civilian and wounded many more. The OSCE reported that a group of observers came under fire near the city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine, but there were no casualties.
Chapter 22
2016
By the end of 2015 Russia and the United States were extending their sanctions on each other’s goods and businesspeople. This had begun with American sanctions against those involved with the Ukrainian conflict, which was followed by Russian retaliation. In January 2016 a British-based group of citizen journalists called Bellingcat named twenty suspects they had tracked down and who they claimed were involved with the downing of MH17.
Based in Leicester, Bellingcat specialised in trawling through data on social media. Its founder, Eliot Higgins, had started a blog in March 2012 under the pseudonym Brown Moses, where he had published his research of online video footage of the Syrian civil war. He had examined hundreds of short clips on the internet, focusing on details of the weapons used. As a result, he was able to establish that the Syrian regime was using cluster munitions and chemical weapons.