Last Thursday, a Dutch court reached a verdict on the 2014 MH17 airplane crash in the Donbass. Four men were on trial for the downing of the civilian flight which killed 298 people, including passengers and crew. Three out of the four men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison while the fourth – the only one of the defendants who was represented by counsel at the trial – was acquitted. According to Euronews:

Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko were found responsible for the disaster, Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said.

Another Russian national, Oleg Polatov, was acquitted of the charges.

The court declared that Girkin, Dubinskiy and Kharchenko must also compensate the relatives of the victims a total of €60 million. Prosecutors and the defendants have two weeks to file an appeal.

The quartet on trial were not present in the courtroom. All at large, they refused to attend the trial, which lasted two and a half years…

…The plane was struck by what the Dutch court established was a missile supplied by Moscow and broke up mid-air, scattering wreckage and bodies over farmland and fields of sunflowers in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk. 

The Russian Foreign Ministry has condemned the trial and its verdict as RT reported:

The decision taken on Thursday by a Dutch court on the MH17 plane crash was absolutely political, the Russian Foreign Ministry has insisted in a statement. Earlier in the day, judges found three people guilty of downing the Malaysian passenger jet over Ukraine in 2014….

Moscow has made it clear that, in accordance with the country’s constitution, it will not be extraditing its citizens.

The court’s decision was based on the conclusions of Dutch prosecutors, which, in turn, were built upon the accounts of anonymous witnesses and evidence presented by the Ukrainian Security Service, which is “an interested party” in the case, the ministry argued. Arguments presented by the Russian side, including data declassified by the Russian Defense Ministry were discarded, it added.

It’s easy to assume that Russia would deny guilt regardless of what actually happened. However, there is reason for skepticism about the investigation that the trial relied upon. First, there was reporting by the late Robert Parry of Consortium News whose investigation and sources revealed gaps and logical inconsistencies in the official narrative of how the ill-fated plane came down:

According to the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which while “led” by the Dutch was guided by the Ukrainian SBU intelligence service, the Russians delivered the Buk anti-missile battery at a border crossing about 30 miles southeast of Luhansk on the night of July 16-17, 2014. From that point, there would have been an easy and logical route to the JIT’s claimed firing site.

The convoy would have followed one of two roads west to H21 and then taken H21 southwest to the area around Snizhne before getting onto a back road to Pervomaiskyi where the JIT says the launch occurred.

Instead, according to the JIT account, the convoy took a strange and circuitous route, skirting south of Luhansk to Yenakiieve, a town that sits along highway E50, which incidentally offered another easy route south to Snizhne. Instead of going that way, according to the JIT, the convoy proceeded southwest to the city of Donetsk, stopping there before turning east on H21 passing through a number of towns on the way to Snizhne.

Not only does this route make no sense, especially given the extreme sensitivity of the Russians providing a powerful anti-aircraft missile battery to the rebels, an operation that would call for the utmost secrecy and care, but the eventual positioning of the Buk system in the remote town of Pervomaiskyi makes little military sense.

According to the JIT’s video narrative, the presumed purpose of the Russians taking such a huge risk of supplying a Buk system was to protect rebel troops from Ukrainian military aircraft firing from heights beyond the range of shoulder-fired MANPADs.

So why would the Russians position the Buk battery in the south far from the frontlines of the heaviest fighting which was occurring in the north and then have the crew shoot down a commercial airliner when, according to the JIT, there were no military aircraft in the area?

To accept the JIT’s narrative, you have to swallow a large dose of credulity, plus assume that the Russians are extremely incompetent, so incompetent that they would send a highly secret operation on a wild ride across the eastern Ukrainian countryside, ignoring easy routes to the target location (only about 70 miles from the Russian border) in favor of a route more than twice as long (about 150 miles) while passing through heavily populated areas where the convoy could be easily photographed.

Then, the Russians (or their rebel allies) would have placed the Buk system in a spot with marginal if any military value, misidentify a commercial airliner as some kind of military aircraft, and – with a sudden burst of efficiency and competence – shoot it down.

The JIT’s claim about the exfiltration of the remaining Buks has similar problems of logic. The JIT asserts that rather than take the most direct (and most discreet) route back to Russia by heading east, the missile battery supposedly traveled north to Luhansk before crossing back into Russia, a longer trip through more populous areas, another head-shaker.

Parry also stated that his sources in the intelligence community told him that it appeared rogue Ukrainian forces were responsible for the downing:

“I was also told that at least some CIA analysts shared the doubts about Russia’s guilt and came to believe that the MH-17 shoot-down was the work of a rogue and out-of-control Ukrainian team with the possible hope that the airliner was a Russian government plane returning President Vladimir Putin from South America.”

In addition, there had been eyewitness reports of at least one military fighter jet in close proximity to MH17 before it went down, which cast doubt on a BUK missile being the source of the plane’s demise.

Other investigative journalists have looked into the case and come up with evidence that casts doubt on many aspects of the Ukrainian-produced “evidence” accepted by the JIT investigators and used as the basis for the trial of the four men. The film below includes interviews with eyewitnesses to the crash and the moments leading up to it, the Malaysian Prime Minister, an officer from the Malaysian military who was originally tasked with collecting the black boxes, and the conclusions of outside experts who studied the aforementioned evidence provided by Ukraine.

Link here.