Ten years ago today, a Malaysian Airlines flight traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed into a wheat field in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Most were Dutch. Many were on vacation. They included entire families, college students, a group of HIV researchers, an aspiring novelist, a nun, a relative of the Malaysian prime minister, and a one-year-old girl.
Coming just four months after the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 370 over the South China Sea – and five months after the ouster of a Kremlin-friendly president in Kyiv had led Russia to invade Crimea and stoke a separatist uprising in Eastern Ukraine – it was a dizzying mashup of two of the world’s biggest news stories. For many, it was also the first moment when the effects of the Ukraine conflict reverberated beyond the marshlands of Eastern Europe.
It quickly became clear that the plane had been shot down. Russia, which denied involvement, launched a disinformation campaign involving a fictional Spanish air traffic controller who said Ukrainian jets had shot down the airliner. But open source researchers and investigative journalists pointed to a surface-to-air missile.
By 2016, an international investigation had confirmed that it was, in fact, a Russian-supplied missile system. Who precisely fired it and why has never been established, but a Dutch court in 2022 sentenced, in absentia, two Russian spooks and a Ukrainian separatist to life in prison for their roles in arranging the transfer of the weapon into Ukraine. Russia, unsurprisingly, has refused to hand them over. Ukraine has several other suits before international courts, which the Kremlin has likewise ignored.
With the full-scale Russian invasion now in its third year, the MH17 story is a reminder that this conflict stretches back well before February 2022. But it’s also a story that echoes themes that have only gotten more pressing in recent years: the murkiness and unpredictable consequences of proxy conflicts; the limits of international law to effectively prosecute and punish bad actors; and the ways that seemingly far-flung or exotic conflicts can quickly irrupt into our lives.
