Front Burner - MH17 jet attack murder trial begins — suspects still at large

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

A trial has begun in Amsterdam for the murder of the 298 people killed in 2014 in the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash over Ukraine. But the four men charged are still at large, and although Russia has been implicated in the downing of the plane, the Putin government has denied any responsibility. CBC's Chris Brown joins Jayme Poisson to talk about the victims' families' search for justice – and why the stakes are so high for Russia.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. A Malaysia Airlines plane with nearly 300 people on board, including at least one Canadian, has crashed in eastern Ukraine. The plane went down near Donetsk, an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels.

It's been five and a half years since Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine. The plane was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 passengers on board died. Now, after a long investigation, a trial has finally begun in the Netherlands. Friso, whore. It took prosecutors a full 18 minutes to read out the names of all 298 people killed. Whole families were named at a time in heavy silence. Three Russians and one Ukrainian are accused of murder in the case. But the thing is, they're all still at large. And it's unclear if any of them will ever face justice.

My colleague Chris Brown has been following this story closely. He was in the Netherlands last week, and today he joins me from Moscow to report on the trial and explain what the victims' families are hoping for. This is Frontburner. Hi, Chris. Welcome back to the podcast. Hey, good to be back, Jamie. So this crash happened on July 17th, 2014. And refresh our memories. What do we know now about what happened that day? Well, this is the longest investigation, the most complex investigation that the Dutch prosecution service has ever

taken on. Their conclusion after talking to eyewitnesses, poring over satellite data, poring over social media photographs, is that a missile, an anti-aircraft missile fired from eastern Ukraine near the town of Shenezh, which was under control of Russian-backed separatists, knocked MH17 out of the sky at about 33,000 feet, killing everybody on board. A majority were Dutch. That is why it is being held right now in Amsterdam

at the courthouse, which is right next to the runway where that plane last took off. And, you know, as you insinuated there, there's a backdrop here. The downing of this airplane is connected to this ongoing conflict between Russia and the Ukraine, something that you've talked about on this podcast before. Indeed. The four people who are suspects here were all militia members, very senior militia commanders, in fact, that were on the battlefield at that day. Igor Gherkin, Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, and Leonid Karchenko. And they are accused,

and they're facing charges of murder, 298 charges of murder, for bringing that missile launcher, it's called a Buk missile launcher, across the border from Russia, and then having the missile fired, and then arranging for that missile launcher to return to Russia. Now, among the many storylines here is that Russia, from the very beginning, has denied that that missile launcher belonged to them. But the investigation by the Dutch prosecution service has been extremely thorough and we know what we're going to hear in terms of evidence is that they believe this came from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Regiment which was based in the Russian city of Kursk. But today Dutch-led investigators said they have hard evidence that the missile used to bring the plane down

belonged to the Russian military and they named the brigade. The evidence from the very beginning has been extremely compelling that this, in fact, was a Russian missile. Someone very high up in Russia's defense ministry had to have given the permission, the order for this to be transported into eastern Ukraine. And remind me, why is Russia saying that they had nothing to do with this? Well, this, of course, would have been extremely illegal, highly illegal to do this. This was not Russian territory. This was separatist territory.

And to this very day, Russia denies that it has ever had any of its people, any of its soldiers, much less any of its equipment, fighting this war. But if this truly was, as prosecutors say, an actual piece of the Russian military that fired this and brought the plane down, it would essentially represent that Russia has been lying this whole time, lying to its people, lying to the world, and it would have very significant political ramifications for the Putin government. What are the prosecutors saying about the circumstances under which the plane was shot down that day? Is the idea here that they thought it was something else?

Well, we know on the day that the plane was shot down, on July 17th, that the airspace was closed below 32,000 feet. was closed below 32,000 feet. But lots of airplanes, many commercial aircraft, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, many of these airlines were flying above it. And we also know that in the air going on below, in the days preceding, there had been a number of other incidents involving aircraft. Some Ukrainian jets had been shot down.

And so there was a an urgency from the separatist commanders to have some stronger firepower to deal with these Ukrainian government planes and and in some of the conversations which have been intercepted and played phone taps and so forth you can hear uh what the prosecutors will say are the voices of some of these men talking to officials in Moscow, asking them to send a Buk missile launcher to this area so that they could defend their troops, so that they could get more firepower on the ground. Huh. Interesting. How did the prosecutors get their hands on these voice taps? We believe those came from the Ukrainian secret services.

We believe they were tapping the phone calls of these men. We'll get more details about that, but certainly, you know, that's the early indication. Other stuff, though, came right out in the public domain. In terms of how they tracked the missile system, the Buk launcher all the way from Kursk into eastern Ukraine, they literally went on the Internet and they found people who posted social media posts and photographs of this launcher being moved on a flatbed truck all the way in. At one point, it actually stopped because it appeared that the crew needed directions. It pulled over on the side of the road and people took pictures of it. And they wrote posts and said, hey, look, there's a Buk missile launcher

in my village. So, you know, the evidence is there and it's very public. And what they did afterwards is they went through and looked at the metadata and they matched that with different Google Maps visuals to sort of show that, yes, it's the same thing and it is where we think it was. So it's pretty solid stuff. The Russians, on the other hand, have claimed it's all fake. They say the metadata is fake. They say the photographs could have been faked. They say because these phone calls came from the Ukrainian Secret Service, well, you know, those aren't real either. They provided the joint investigation team with their own data, radar data, which they said showed that there was a Ukrainian plane in the area, a jet that could have shot down MH17.

You know, Dutch prosecutors have looked at all of that stuff supplied by Russia, and they haven't given it a whole lot of credibility. In fact, they've given it no credibility at all. So this is where, this is the tension in this story, is that from the very beginning, Dutch prosecutors claim that Russia has been trying to thwart their investigation by bombarding them with all kinds of misinformation, fake data, stories that don't add up, one scenario here, a conflicting scenario there, anything to try to convince people,

particularly a Russian audience, that really we'll never know the truth about this. You can't trust the joint investigation team, the Dutch team, and this is just not knowable. And it gives them this fig leaf, if you will, that they can hide behind that it really wasn't their book. I know when you were in the Netherlands, you spoke to the family members of some of the victims, one Bryce Fredericks, and you visited his mother at her home. I want to talk to you about what she thinks about all of this. What does she hope to get out of this trial? Well, this is a very emotional thing to go visit these

relatives of these people who've had their lives absolutely ripped apart and their very essence has been changed by this crime. And you go to visit Selene and you see upstairs Bryce's room. She's not touched it in five and a half years. It is exactly the same way as it was that morning on July 17th when Bryce and Daisy, his girlfriend, got up out of bed. They didn't make their bed. They left their desk all cluttered. There was a half-drunk bottle of 7-Up on there. There were all kinds of, you know, gum wrappers and things like that. She's left it all exactly the same. So to go into this

room, it's like a place that's frozen in time. To hear her talk about her son is also painful. This is all we've got. That's why I keep it like this. I don't know for how long. I don't know. As long as I feel like that I want to keep it, I keep it this way. And really the families, they didn't even get bodies in many cases. They only got little bits and little pieces of bodies. And so for her, keeping this place as it was is sort of a memorial.

She's hoping, I don't know if she really believes it will happen, but she's hoping that this trial will point the finger, will lay blame on these people who she believes are responsible for this atrocity. And she hopes perhaps in time it will give her some comfort. But I think for her mostly, this is a chance to have the case laid out, to have a lot of this misinformation that's been spewing forth from the Kremlin, to absolutely say that that's false and this is the narrative, this is what really happened, and that is what she told us is what she's really hoping for.

Maybe then the world will see how Rochelle really is. And that's the only thing we can do. There's not more we can do. But then we can say we've done it all for our children, all the other victims, for ourselves. And is it fair for me to say when it comes to accountability here for these four men who are charged with murder, she may not get this because they're actually not even in the courtroom. They're not in the courtroom. And it's tough on them. These men, some are ones here in Moscow.

Igor Gurkin is. Journalists have called him. Some have stopped him on the street. He has told the media that separatists weren't responsible for this atrocity. But beyond that, he's not said anything. The other suspects haven't spoken either. And some of them are in eastern Ukraine, some are in other parts of Russia. One of them, Oleg Pilatov, has actually hired a defense lawyer, which is interesting. We didn't know that before the trial began. So he'll have someone there representing his interests. But of course, if it's a guilty verdict, you know, it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever show up.

But the prosecution addressed this on the first day. They said regimes change. They're being given protection by the Russian government now. That may not always be the case. And it's important to have this record of what happened. I know you mentioned earlier that if it was proven that the missile came from Russia, that it would be illegal under international law. Is it possible that Russian officials sort of higher up the chain here could eventually be charged? Well, it's entirely possible.

How probable is it is a very good question. could eventually be charged? Well, it's entirely possible. How probable is it is a very good question. I mean, we've talked to some folks who believe that this could go as high up as people who are like Russia's defense minister, people who were senior advisors to Vladimir Putin. So far, the people who the prosecutors have gone after, you can describe them more as the middlemen. They have not charged the people who actually pressed the button. They have not charged the person who gave the order. Instead, they've charged the people who they

believe brought the book in. But there's still a lot of time. This trial is going to go on for months, maybe even years, and their investigation is still going on. What they don't have right now, it would appear, is someone who's flipped on the inside to kind of lay this case out for them at the very highest of levels. One of the things that they do seem to have, which we've learned, is an eyewitness on the ground. They're calling him witness number 58, who's apparently going to testify about seeing the book, witnessing the launch, about being there when the word came back that an aircraft had been shot down, and then speaking about the efforts to get the book out of there. So that's very powerful, very compelling, but it still doesn't point the finger at those very high up in the chain.

You know, as you've mentioned, it feels like there's a lot of effort here by the Putin government to try and cast doubt and deny any involvement here. Like, what are the stakes here for the Putin government? Well, the stakes are very high. I mean, credibility is a huge one. But also, basically, a six-year disinformation campaign is also at stake. Russia's spun a lot of different narratives. It was a Ukrainian aircraft that shot the jet down. No, it was not a Ukrainian aircraft. It was a Ukrainian Buk missile, not a Russian one. They've retweeted and pushed blogs and made all kinds of questionable claims. They've also, according to Dutch prosecutors, hacked, actually, the investigators' laptops.

They've hacked their systems to try to get access to this. They've threatened witnesses, according to the Dutch prosecutors as well. The court also heard prosecution claims that Russian intelligence agents had been at the site of the missile launcher on the day MH17 was hit, and a number of witnesses in eastern Ukraine fear for their life and will need to remain anonymous for their own safety. So there is that, that it could be a major defeat for Russia's secret services if this comes out and if the Dutch prosecutors prove their case. Russia's secret services if this comes out and if the Dutch prosecutors prove their case.

Beyond that, I mean, I think we have to be realistic. It's unlikely that this is going to suddenly lead Vladimir Putin to stand up and say, OK, you got me. We're in eastern Ukraine. I don't think that's going to happen. What you're going to see is you're going to see some shift to some other kind of narrative. They'll find something else to attack, some other credibility to assail. But this will be very significant, and it will make Russia's job that much harder. I actually also understand that there was one Canadian on board MH17, Andrei Ankel.

And what does his family want to see happen here? Well, we talked to, we wrote his mom, Anka. She has spoken to us in interviews before, but she didn't want to us in interviews before, but she didn't want to do one this time, and that's pretty understandable. This is a gut-wrenching exercise for the families to go through. So they're not coming to Amsterdam to be at this trial.

She's going to follow what she told us through the media. They were here last year, and that's when prosecutors let families see security footage of the last moments before their loved ones got on the airplane. And they hadn't actually seen that before, so they were able to see them walking around the airport, checking in their bags, going shopping, almost right up until when they got on the plane. And so Selene told us that was a huge deal for them. Another man, Pete Ploeg, we talked to, said it was very emotional for them to see this new footage of their families. And so Anka said, you know, that was important for them. But this trial is going to be very painful. She didn't think it would bring them much comfort by going.

She hopes it does bring some justice, though. Chris, before we go today, I know that you also recently covered the Ukrainian PS-752 flight that crashed over Iran. And, you know, I imagine the people listening to this, their minds will also go to that recent crash, which killed 57 Canadians, 138 people were headed to Canada. And there have been a lot of questions over whether or not the families of those victims on board will see justice. And as someone who's covered both of these tragic events, I wonder what kind of observations you have. Well, the key one I would say is that the families here in the Netherlands feel that the families who lost loved ones on board the Ukrainian Airlines jet were spared an immense amount of suffering and an immense amount of anguish because they ran fast up and because they admitted within a few days that this was an accident and it was shot down. So these families that we've been speaking to, the families going into this trial, the ones that will be going every

day for months and months, as long as it goes on, they don't have that. And so that apology, that sense of understanding and knowing is very, very important. And that's one of the major differences. Selene, she wishes she had what they had because it would at least allow them to move on more than what they've been able to. That's what we say all the time. Just say sorry. It was a mistake.

We're sorry. We take responsibility. Okay. Chris Brown, thank you so much. Thank you, Jamie. All right. So after Chris and I spoke yesterday, some pretty significant news on Ukrainian flight PS752. Iran has reportedly finally agreed to send the black boxes of the downed jet to the Ukraine.

This comes after a two-month standoff. For the families, this could mean some more answers here. And I just want to take this opportunity to flag something a little bit different that we're doing here at FrontBurner. With the news yesterday that the WHO is calling COVID-19 a global pandemic, we're starting to release special episodes focused on the virus. They're shorter. They'll be available end of day, so you can listen to them maybe on your commute home. We're going to start with two episodes a week, and we'll go from there.

Our hope is that this will be a clear, calm look at developments of the day for you, and that it will help answer questions, the many questions you have as we go forward. The first episode dropped yesterday evening, and you can find that in our feed. That's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and talk to you tomorrow.