Russia was responsible for shooting down a Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014 that killed all 298 people on board — which became one of aviation’s biggest mysteries, the United Nations aviation agency has ruled.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was struck by a Russian-made missile while flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur as Russian separatists battled Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region below.
The UN’s Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO] on Monday found that the Russian federation violated the Convention on International Civil Aviation, known as the Chicago Convention, which requires countries to “refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight.”
Russia has long denied any responsibility for the incident.
The case was brought to the UN in 2022 by the Dutch and Australian governments. Of the nearly 300 victims, 196 were from the Netherlands and 38 were from Australia, according to the BBC. British, Belgian and Malaysian nationals were also killed.
“We call upon Russia to finally face up to its responsibility for this horrific act of violence and make reparations for its egregious conduct,” Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong in a statement after the vote.
The ruling — which raises the possibility of victims’ families being paid compensation — represents the first time in the history of the ICAO that a dispute between governments has been decided.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp said that the Netherlands and Australia in the coming weeks “are requesting that the ICAO Council order the Russian Federation to enter into negotiations with the Netherlands and Australia, and that the Council facilitate this process.”
“The latter is important in order to ensure that the negotiations are conducted in good faith and according to specific timelines, and that they will yield actual results,” he added.
In 2022, a Dutch court convicted two former Russian intelligence agents and a pro-Russian Ukrainian leader of murder for helping arrange the delivery of the Russian BUK missile system that was used to shoot the plane down.
The three convicted defendants, Russians Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinskiy and Ukrainian separatist Leonid Kharchenko, were tried in absentia and sentenced to life in prison but remain at large.
With Post Wires
