Six years ago, on July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), a Boeing 777 carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members, was shot down by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile that was fired from Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine.
President Petro Poroshenko, in those initial days, said, “I would like to note that we are calling this not an incident, not a catastrophe, but a terrorist act.” Mr. Poroshenko invited Dutch experts to assist in the investigation that included the International Civil Aviation Organization and other international experts.
The commercial airliner was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lampur, and even from the preliminary information available at the time, Ukraine’s Internal Affairs Ministry advisor Anton Herashchenko said that a missile was used to down the plane. Andrei Purgin, a self-styled first vice-premier of the so-called Donetsk “people’s republic,” claimed that the separatists did not possess weapons capable of reaching targets at an altitude above 10,000 meters.