After an exhaustive, 15-month investigation, the Dutch Safety Board affirmed on Tuesday what has long been generally known or suspected — that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile.
Even Russia, which has spent much of those 15 months generating all kinds of implausible theories that put the blame for the crash and its 298 victims on Ukraine, and doing its best to thwart investigations, has had to acknowledge that this is what happened. But it now argues that the fatal missile was an older model that the Russian armed forces no longer use and that it was fired from territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.
The five-nation team led by the Dutch Safety Board did not assign responsibility. That will be the job of Dutch prosecutors. But the board’s minutely detailed report is consistent with theories advanced by the United States and Ukraine as well as evidence collected by the independent investigative website Bellingcat.com, which hold that the fatal missile was fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.
In one key detail, the Dutch report undermined Russia’s competing claim. The Russian corporation that manufactures Buk missiles, Almaz-Antey, held its own news conference Tuesday at which it said it had detonated a warhead of the sort used to arm the Buk missile identified by the Dutch alongside a decommissioned Russian jetliner to demonstrate that this explosion would pepper the plane with bowtie-shape shrapnel, which it said was not found at the crash site. But in fact, the Dutch board said it had discovered fragments of that exact shape, including some in the bodies of the cockpit crew.
This fact is not something Russians are likely to learn; Russian television has presented only the Kremlin’s disinformation of what is going on in Ukraine and, for that matter, Syria. Propaganda works: A public opinion poll taken in July by the Levada Center found that 44 percent of Russians believe the plane was downed by the Ukrainian military, 17 percent thought it was by the United States, and only 3 percent believed it was the work of separatists.
Creating an alternative reality has been a big reason for President Vladimir Putin’s boundless popularity among Russians. He sees no reason to come clean for the shooting down of the Boeing 777. At the same time, Ukrainian authorities should also give some credible responses to the Dutch board’s criticism that Ukraine failed to close the air space over eastern Ukraine even though Ukrainian military aircraft had been shot down by Russian-backed rebels in the weeks before the downing of Flight 17.
Against Russia’s shameless deception, the Dutch, who lost the largest number of people in the tragedy, must be commended for the thoroughness and integrity of their investigation. The criminal investigation should be as clear and independent, no matter how hard the Kremlin tries to derail or mislead it.