The first thing I saw was body parts being pulled out from under a seat. I was one of the first journalists to reach the crash site near Grabovo. I got my camera out and looked through the viewfinder. For the rest of that day, I followed everything through that small frame.
Looking directly at what had fallen from the sky was too much. The remains of 298 people lay scattered across fields of sunflowers. Many of them were children. The wreckage of a modern airliner was torn apart across the Ukrainian countryside.
It was July 17th, 2014. Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 had been shot down, and it would become the worst downing of a civilian aircraft by a military missile in the history of flight. Piet Ploeg was having a drink with colleagues on a terrace when one of them looked at his smartphone and said a plane had crashed. “What kind of plane?
” Piet asked. “Where did it come from? ”
“It came from Amsterdam. It was going to Kuala Lumpur.
”
At that moment, Piet knew. His brother had been on that flight, traveling with his wife and son to show them the places he had visited over the years. They had planned to go diving in Bali. “I saw him the day before and we said goodbye,” Piet said.
“I knew what time he left from Schiphol. It was a very big shock to me. ”
The Boeing 777 had departed Schiphol Airport at half past midday. There was nothing extraordinary about the flight.
The passenger list included a Dutch senator, prominent AIDS activists, business professionals heading to a medical conference, a nun, and many entire families traveling together. Ingrid Meijer was traveling with her three young daughters: Sophie, twelve, Fleur, ten, and Bente, seven. Malaysian actress Shuba Jay was heading home with her Dutch husband, Paul Goes, and their infant daughter, Kaela. The plane flew over Poland and Ukraine.
As it followed the standard route toward Kuala Lumpur, the pilot asked the Ukrainian air traffic control in Dnipropetrovsk for permission to deviate north to avoid a storm. Permission was granted. The aircraft shifted twenty nautical miles north for about half an hour, then returned to its path. The pilot requested permission to climb to 34,000 feet, but the controller denied it because a Singapore Airlines aircraft was on the same route at that altitude.
The plane stayed at 33,000 feet. At 1:20 PM UTC, about three hours into the flight, MH17 disappeared from the radar screens. In the Netherlands, the shock began to spread. Piet had to tell his parents, who were ill and in the hospital, that their son, daughter-in-law, and grandson had died.
“When I came there, they were just looking at the first news footage of the plane crash. They didn’t know that their own son had died there with his wife and son. That was very difficult to tell. ”
The news reached Ukraine as well.
The country was already in turmoil. After the escape of former president Yanukovych, the annexation of Crimea, and Russian aggression in Donbas, the region was torn by conflict. Separatist forces, heavily backed by the Russian army, controlled huge areas of eastern Ukraine. Igor Burdiga, a journalist who reached the crash site, spoke to local pensioners, former miners from Grabovo who had taken part in the initial search.
“They told me they saw a light, something exploding in the sky. Then they saw objects falling. They walked through the fields and found someone’s arm. They took it to the search party.
They drank half a liter of vodka each after that. ”
The first people on the scene were militia members of the self-proclaimed Republic of Donetsk. The recovery was harrowing. Locals found passports and toys belonging to the three Van de Meer sisters.
Within hours, Dutch, Australian, and Malaysian investigators were in Ukraine, trying to reach the crash site. But it was a war zone. The confusion gave the Ukrainian armed forces an opportunity to counterattack through the crash site area, delaying the recovery of bodies and wreckage. The joint investigation team was set up, including members from Ukraine, Malaysia, and Australia, led by the Dutch.
Four collection zones emerged: one where the cockpit had fallen, another where the portion of the aircraft forward of the wing attachment landed, another where the rear of the aircraft fell, and the wings and engines ended up in even more remote locations. On Saturday, two days after the crash, police came to visit Piet and his brother’s daughters. They asked intimate questions about the bodies, about physical features, scars, and special marks. “Things you don’t want to know as a child from your father and mother,” Piet said.
“They gave detailed descriptions of what they found. I have lists of it at home. The daughters of my brother don’t want to know. I kept the details so maybe one day, if they want to know, I can tell them and they don’t have to go to the police.
”
He realized that day that he was now the only son left. He had to take care of the children and his parents. The parts of the aircraft were collected and deposited at the airbase at Gilze-Rijen in the Netherlands, where a special hangar was set up. Eventually, all recovered parts were rebuilt to help identify what happened.
This was important to establish the ballistics of the incident, where an explosion might have occurred, and what had happened to the airframe. Three or four days after the crash, the Dutch government organized a meeting for all next of kin. Thousands attended. The king and queen were there, the prime minister, and many members of parliament.
It was the beginning of a long period of government support for the families. On July 27th, 2014, the whole of the Netherlands mourned. The flight had killed more Dutch citizens in a single event than any other since the end of the Second World War. While the official investigation was still getting underway, a group of independent researchers was already one step ahead.
Bellingcat, a collective of amateur and professional open-source analysts, began sifting through hours of social media films and photographs. “Back then, we were all volunteers,” said Peter van Heus, a member of the team. “We were doing this simply because we thought it was important. I was encouraged because this was such a big disaster in the Netherlands.
I knew how to do this type of research because I was already doing it before the crash. ”
The analysts knew that Russian soldiers were posting images of their military service on Russian social media sites like VK and Odnoklassniki. In the months before the disaster, they had already found many Russian soldiers posting photos of themselves in Ukraine, even though they were part of a secret mission. “They simply never expected people to actually find them,” Peter said.
The sheer number of pictures helped identify the missile launcher. Once photos and films were gathered, Bellingcat matched them to actual sites using Google Maps and satellite data. They traced the route of a Buk missile system believed to have shot down the plane, made a map, and presented it to Dutch officials. The Buk system started its journey in Kursk, Russia, at the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade.
From there, it drove in a large military convoy to the border with Ukraine. It was first spotted by an eyewitness on the morning of July 17th in the town of Yenakiieve. It drove to Donetsk, then via Zuhres and Torez to Snizhne, where it stationed itself south of the town. The investigators established that the plane had been downed by a Russian-made Buk missile.
The carcass of the airliner told a clear story. A widespread of holes in the fuselage above the cockpit indicated that the missile exploded nearby. A hail of shrapnel, some round, some butterfly-shaped, penetrated the cockpit, probably killing the pilot and co-pilot instantly. The shockwaves traveled down the fuselage, causing the carbon-composite structure to crack and break rather than bend, tearing the cockpit from the cabin.
The airframe was subjected to loads it wasn’t designed for. The wings and tail section separated as the aircraft went into a spin. At 33,000 feet, the decompression killed the passengers almost instantly. Bellingcat identified several uniquely identifiable markers on the missile system: a small piece of paint on the side that indicated the unit number, and certain damage marks.
This made it stand out from other similar systems. “This missile system was operating on its own, also without a secondary radar system present,” Peter explained. “It would have been the officer inside the missile system itself that decided to shoot it down. We don’t know what type of information they had received.
”
The missile launcher had left Donetsk on a white flatbed Volvo truck at 11:00 AM, just as MH17 passengers were checking in. It was unloaded and moved independently to the firing point near Snizhne around 1:00 PM, half an hour before MH17 took off. The voice intercepts recorded by the Ukrainian secret service captured the confusion of the separatist fighters who had fired the missile. They were amazed because they really believed they had shot down a Sukhoi military aircraft, as had happened the day before.
They were so convinced that they kept telling themselves they had shot down such an aircraft, and that this Sukhoi aircraft had in turn shot down MH17. Russia, from the first day of the downing, had begun to blame Ukraine and created all possible versions about what had happened. The Ukrainian delegation started a strong campaign in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and other international institutions, blaming the Russian Federation and stating the downing was strongly connected to the death of hundreds of people on board. “Definitely, they wanted to hide any evidence that could tie the Russian and separatist sides to the downing,” Peter said.
“Because they immediately wanted to blame Ukraine for it. But also the evidence of Russian involvement, because it was a Russian missile system. It’s not just evidence of a war crime on the Russian side, but it also shows that the entire uprising in Eastern Ukraine was orchestrated by Russia and led by them. ”
Documents proved that all professional people involved in the missile operation were Russian specialists.
Some roles, like drivers or other low-level positions, were filled by local Ukrainian citizens from Donbas. But the crucial and key roles were filled by Russian military professionals. By July 2019, the Joint Investigation Team had identified four men as being directly involved in the mass murder. Igor Girkin was the Minister of Defense for the Donetsk People’s Republic.
He was the leader of the separatist movement at the time. Based on available phone intercepts, he had been pushing to have such a missile system in separatist-held territory in order to shoot down Ukrainian aircraft. Sergei Dubinsky was head of military intelligence in the Donetsk People’s Republic. He was the one who actually received the missile system.
His troops coordinated the entire transport. Oleg Pulatov accompanied the Buk missile launcher. And Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian citizen, was intercepted in telephone conversations. Both Pulatov and Kharchenko were standing right next to the launcher at the launch site, organizing its security.
“Since the first day of the downing of plane MH17, Russia began to blame Ukraine and to create all possible versions about that,” said a Ukrainian official. “But we know the truth. ”
The four men were to stand trial in a Dutch court, all in absentia. The trial was scheduled to take place six and a half years after the crash, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Three of the accused were Russians, one Ukrainian. Piet Ploeg reflected on the long wait:
“We want to know what happened. Why did it happen? Who was responsible?
Not only the one who pushed the button, but also who in the end was responsible for it. The four suspects who are standing trial now, they won’t do any time even if they are found guilty. That’s not so important to me. The most important thing is that the world knows who was responsible.
Not only because we want justice, but also because we want to prevent this. This may never happen again. ”
The crash of MH17 was not an isolated event. On January 8th, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 took off from Tehran airport heading to Kyiv when it was shot down by two anti-aircraft missiles fired by Iranian Revolutionary Guards by mistake.
In 1987, Iran Air flight 655, carrying 290 people, was downed by a US Navy anti-aircraft missile fired from the USS Vincennes, which mistook the airliner for an incoming missile. In 1980, Itavia flight 870, with 81 people on board, was shot down during a suspected dogfight between Libyan and NATO aircraft over the Italian island of Ustica. International regulators had established a safe altitude for flying over conflict zones: 8,000 meters, or about 30,000 feet. Yet no airline had officially been informed of the danger of flying over Eastern Ukraine.
They flew there under their own initiative, monitoring crisis areas but making no decision to avoid the airspace. “There’s not really any decent international standards for when someone is to close down the airspace,” Peter said. “Ukraine was in conflict, but until several days before MH17 was shot down, no Ukrainian aircraft had been shot down above a certain altitude. That’s because separatists only had shoulder-fired missiles that could not reach civilian aircraft.
So there was no danger for civil aviation if they flew over the conflict zone at cruising altitude. This changed in the few days preceding MH17. ”
The airspace over Eastern Ukraine was never closed, even though Ukrainian military aircraft had been shot down in the days before. The Ukrainian government maintained it had full sovereignty over its airspace and continued to offer air traffic control for it.
“We don’t know exactly what led to the misidentifying of this aircraft,” Peter said. “How come they didn’t notice that it was a civilian aircraft? It should be very easy to see. We were able to see exactly where civilian aircraft were flying with the website Flightradar24.
If they had only had access to this website or had been in contact with someone, that would already be sufficient. Also, this missile system, as far as I know, should have had radar information that showed it was a civilian aircraft. ”
At the crash site, investigators found part of a Buk missile and butterfly-shaped pieces of shrapnel typical of the Buk missile system. This was the closest they would ever get to a smoking gun.
Social media pictures showed the same paint on the side of the missile as it was moved from its home in Kursk, deep within Russia, to its position in Donbas. A monument now stands close to Schiphol Airport, a light beam pointing through a hole in a rusty iron wall toward Ukraine, where the plane plunged to the earth. A tree has been planted for every passenger. Piet Ploeg still carries the weight of his loss.
“The next of kin were very worthy in waiting,” he said. “They have all reason to be angry. And they remained very dignified. ”
His brother was a biologist who traveled often to Asia.
He wanted to show his wife and son where he had gone all those years. They had made a holiday of it, planning to dive in Bali. But most importantly, he wanted to show them the places he had worked.
Today, one day, this field of flowers and trees just beyond the runway at Schiphol will become a forest of memories, linked to the worst downing of a civilian airplane in Europe’s history.
