After Carlos was disclosed as a fraud, Russian media outlets published reports of a new key witness who could back the Ukrainian jet theory. This new anonymous witness said that on 17 July he was staying on the air base in the village of Aviatorskoe, near Dnepropetrovsk, and claimed to have seen a Su-25 jet that had previously been loaded with air-to-air missiles returning to base with one missile missing. The pilot of the aircraft, Captain Vladislav Voloshin, had been exceptionally nervous after landing, and talked about the ‘wrong plane’.
Questions about the feasibility of a Su-25 downing MH17 were again raised. Were the Russians telling the truth? It would seem that an experienced pilot like Voloshin would have noticed it was the wrong plane before he fired a missile at it. Flight MH17 was a big aircraft and not one that could be mistaken for a Russian spy aircraft.
If it had flown so close to the civilian aircraft, the MH17 pilots would have noticed the jet on its radars; but the Dutch Safety Board report states that: ‘No aural warnings or alerts of aircraft system malfunction were heard on the cockpit voice recording, which ended at 13.20.03 hours. Crew communication gave no indication that there was anything abnormal with the flight.’
The DSB also concluded that only a rocket fired from the ground had the explosive power displayed in the destruction of MH17 and that the missile of a Su-25 would have left a very different damage pattern.
Captain Vladislav Voloshin had from the start called the Russian allegation a lie. He denied that he had been carrying air-to-air missiles and said that he had never flown his jet on 17 July. He had however flown his aircraft on 23 July and his load had been air-to-surface weapons for ground targets.
After the Russian accusations in December 2014, Voloshin quit the Ukrainian Air Force and became acting director of Mykolaiv International Airport in 2017. In Ukraine he was a war hero who had flown thirty-three combat missions in a low-flying Su-25 ground attack jet against Russian-backed separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and had been awarded a medal for bravery. But after he left the army, his colleagues at work reported that he had been feeling depressed. Voloshin took his own life at his home in Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, in March 2018.
On the day the pilot took his life, his wife heard a gunshot and ran to him. She immediately called police and an ambulance, but a team of paramedics arriving on the scene was unable to save him. Voloshin’s father said: ‘The reason for his death was obviously the war—and everyday problems.’
After MH17 was shot down, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), among its other responses, set up a Conflict Zone Information Repository as a means of sharing relevant information among states and air carriers about the routes they fly.
The Dutch Safety Board, which had issued eleven recommendations about flying over conflict zones in its October 2015 final report on the downing of MH17, in early 2018 launched an investigation to assess what follow-up there had been to its recommendations. The board said it wanted to determine the measures that parties had taken regarding airspace management in conflict zones and the sharing of information about threats. The board also said it would look at how operators consider flying over conflict zones in their risk analyses. According to the report: ‘The investigation shows that a range of measures has been implemented. However, the effect on flight safety is difficult to measure. States and airlines around the world are aware of the issue at stake and devote more attention to it. Stakeholders no longer assume that open airspace over a conflict zone actually guarantees safe passage. Airlines are taking a more structured approach to analysing the risks and uncertainties, scaling up to a higher risk level at an earlier stage. Some airlines state that they now decide more quickly to refrain from overflying specific areas if no clear information relating to such areas is available.’
At the beginning of March 2018 former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia became the victims of a nerve-gas poisoning in Salisbury, England. England immediately pointed the finger at Russia, saying that their involvement was very plausible, even though there was no hard evidence. But the outrageous use of a banned Russian nerve agent on British soil was the first chemical weapon attack in Europe since the Second World War and, in retaliation, Great Britain immediately expelled Russian diplomats. Australia, the United States and several European countries, including the Netherlands—did the same. Twenty-eight nations together expelled a total of 153 Russian diplomats in an unprecedented demonstration of global solidarity with the United Kingdom.
Relatives of the MH17 victims, however, were furious. No diplomats had been ordered to leave the country after their loved ones were murdered. Why were the Netherlands and Australia so eager to take measures in this case? Prime Minister Mark Rutte hurried to explain that the two cases were totally different and could not be compared. ‘The Netherlands must be neutral in the MH17 case, because otherwise the investigation will be discredited,’ he said. ‘If we point the finger at one country then the chances decrease that we will ever get the perpetrators to court.’
On 26 May the JIT held a press conference. The team presented evidence about the origin of the Buk TELAR (transporter erector launcher and radar) that was involved in the downing of MH17, saying it had belonged to the 53rd AntiAircraft Missile Brigade based near the city of Kursk, Russia. The JIT also presented seven unique characteristics of the Buk owned by that anti-aircraft brigade.
As long ago as May 2016 Bellingcat had published its report on the unique characteristics of the Buk. The JIT report now was mostly based on what Bellingcat had presented in 2016, but this evidence had now been thoroughly investigated so that it could stand up in court. They also claimed to have irrefutable evidence that a Russian-based brigade was responsible for the crime. The JIT had asked the Russian Federation to provide information on the whereabouts of the 53rd brigade in July 2014, but Moscow had not responded to these requests. Although presented as new information, most people who had followed the news about MH17 over the years had heard it all before.
The Joint Investigation Team found itself forced to seek other avenues to obtain information about the perpetrators and once again requested help from the public so it could finalise its investigation into the 53rd brigade. Answers to a number of questions were needed:
Who were the members of the Buk crew?
Who gave them instructions, and what were they?
Who was responsible for the operational deployment of the Buk?
Who can provide information on the 53rd brigade?
The next day on 25 May, Bellingcat, jointly with The Insider, the Moscow-based investigative website run by Roman Dobrokhotov, and the Washington bureau of the US newspaper company McClatchy, held a press conference in the Netherlands. Researchers claimed ‘with very high certainty’ that they had located the man who went by the code name ‘Orion’. Together with ‘Delfin’, he was suspected of having coordinated pro-Russian separatists in the region and he had most likely played a role in the MH17 tragedy. The man in question turned out to be a Russian military intelligence officer named Oleg Ivannikov, who previously served (under a different name) as defence minister for the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. Oleg was a missile specialist who was in charge of military operations in eastern Ukraine during an ‘undercover deployment’ by Russia at the time of the downing of the MH17.