In September 2018, Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had ‘newly discovered evidence’ that potentially pinned the attack on Ukraine. According to the defence ministry, the serial number found on debris from the Buk missile was cross-referenced with a logbook purporting to show it was produced in 1986. The missile was then delivered by rail to a military unit in western Ukraine and, to their knowledge, had not left Ukraine since. Russia was implying that the missile was fired by Kiev’s forces. Ukraine’s defence minister, Stepan Poltorak, dismissed Russia’s claims as an ‘absolute lie’ and ‘another fake story’. In a statement on 17 September, the JIT said it would ‘meticulously study the materials presented as soon as the Russian Federation makes the relevant documents available to the JIT as requested in May 2018’ and required under a UN Security Council resolution.
At the end of September, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Stef Blok, let his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, know that he would like to talk to him about the MH17 disaster. The Dutch minister had bumped into Lavrov in New York, where the general meeting of the United Nations was being held. Blok urged Lavrov to join him at the negotiating table to try to come to some kind of understanding. Lavrov said it was too early to come to any conclusion about the MH17, simply because the investigation was ongoing. And he certainly did not see any reason why Russia should express apologies in the matter.
In October the Dutch authorities revealed that they had expelled four Russian spies in April after they were caught trying to hack into the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Dutch investigators said the spies also intended to travel onwards to the Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland, which was at that time testing novichok samples from the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. Among the men arrested in The Hague was one officer accused of conducting ‘malign activity’ targeting Malaysian institutions investigating the downing of flight MH17.
Chapter 25
Empty chairs
In July 2019, five years will have passed since the MH17 plunged into a sunflower and wheat field in eastern Ukraine. If anything, the disaster has made clear that international peace and security cannot be taken for granted and that, if we turn our heads away from what is happening in the world, disasters will continue to happen. International and internal terrorism, as well as the unrestricted flow of conventional and high-tech weaponry, have no regard for state borders, national sovereignty or human lives. Worldwide, foreign policy should be more than just a short-term national interest. The fate of Flight MH17 has taught us that problems other countries face can quickly become disastrous for all of us.
The war in Ukraine is still raging. Despite the focus on Ukraine’s problems in the aftermath of the MH17 tragedy, the ongoing civil war has once again faded into the background—a forgotten war in which every day people still lose their lives. The dead are reduced to little more than anonymous statistics in a conflict that has taken well over ten thousand lives. On an international scale little has been done to ease the plight of the people in eastern Ukraine. Russian ‘humanitarian’ convoys trundle into the area regularly, but no one really knows what exactly is being transported in those trucks. The USA claims it is ‘aiding’ Ukraine, but this ‘aid’ is only meant to be used for boosting defence resources. Kiev has said it will use the funds to buy anti-tank weapons. And so the fight for power in a dilapidated industrial area in an unassuming part of the world rattles on.
For the MH17 families, there was a life before 17 July 2014 and a life after it. The initial shock and grief of losing family members was followed by a period of almost unbearable uncertainty before the bodies were returned. When the remains were finally brought home, the slow process of identification began. To help with identification, relatives were asked to donate DNA and to answer countless questions about the victim’s external characteristics—whether they had tattoos, or were ever operated on, or about the underwear they had worn that day. The forensic specialists asked for clothes, jewellery, toothbrushes, all dental records as well as family photos showing the victim’s teeth. The long process of identification, returning possessions and dealing with practical matters was excruciatingly hard.
When the redeeming news of a victim’s identification was finally passed on to their families, the sad ritual of the burial followed. For some this brought closure; for others it was an agonising reality that truly brought home what had happened on that devastating day.
Some relatives received bodies that were fully intact while others were almost intact. But many relatives only received body parts to bury—some only a finger or bone fragment. A few families had already conducted a funeral and buried what they thought was left of their loved one’s remains, only to have forensics tell them that more body parts had been found. It forced them to choose to either organise another funeral ceremony or have the additional remains buried or cremated without commemoration.
Two victims remained totally missing. No body part was ever found of sixteen-year-old Gary Slok or Alex Ploeg (fifty-eight), both Dutch. Gary Slok’s father, Jan, went to Eindhoven airport eleven times, hoping every time that remains of Gary, however small, would be in one of the caskets unloaded from the plane. After these arrivals both Jan Slok and Alex’s brother Piet Ploeg would wait anxiously to hear from the forensics, but neither ever received that telephone call.
Although many relatives and friends felt their lives had ended that day, life went on regardless. Everyone dealt with their loss differently and in their own time. At the end of 2016, relatives and friends planted the trees for their loved ones at the National Monument MH17 in Vijfhuizen. The Australian parents of Jack O’Brien, Jon and Meryn, found it somehow helped to plant the tree and place small trinkets from family members on its branches; however, for Silene Fredriksz-Hoogzand, the act of planting the sapling had felt like betrayal, as if she had replaced her son, Bryce, and his girlfriend, Daisy, with a tree. ‘I had a son. Now I have a tree.’ It had made her all the angrier for her loss.
Viewing the wreckage also evoked mixed emotions. Before this, the victims’ deaths for some remained an abstraction, something they had heard about but had no actual physical proof of. But when they were confronted by the wreckage, all hope ended at the sight of those scattered plane parts in that cold hangar.
While the downing of MH17 was shocking, it is rare, but not unprecedented, for civilian airliners to be shot down. On 4 October 2001 the Ukrainian military accidentally shot down a Russian civilian plane while carrying out exercises on the Crimean peninsula. They had launched a surface-to-air missile that struck a Siberia Airlines plane as it was travelling from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk, Russia: all seventy-eight people on board were killed, and the plane disintegrated over the Black Sea. Much earlier, on 3 July 1988, Iran Air Flight 655, en route from Bandar Abbas in Iran to Dubai, was shot down by surface-to-air missiles from the US warship USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers, including sixty-six children and sixteen crew members.
On 1 September 1983 Korean Air Lines Flight 007, travelling from New York City to Seoul, was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane. The plane had deviated from its original planned route and flown through Soviet prohibited airspace; the Soviet Air Forces mis-identified the aircraft as an intruding US spy plane and proceeded to attack it with air-to-air missiles. It disappeared in the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew. And on 27 June 1980, Itavia Flight 870 from Bologna to Palermo crashed in the Tyrrhenian Sea, near Sicily, killing eighty-one passengers and crew members; although initially there was doubt as to how and why the plane had crashed, investigators concluded that it was ‘abundantly clear’ that the plane was downed by a missile strike. The history of civilian planes being shot from the skies in fact goes back as far as 1955, when El Al Flight 402 travelling from Vienna to Tel Aviv was shot down by two Bulgarian MiG fighters. Bulgaria admitted to having shot the plane down ‘in error’.