The International Criminal Court in The Hague has convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian for the July 18, 2014, 2014, downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, carrying 298 people, over Donbass, Ukraine. All three men are believed to be living in Russia. Two days later, Australia asked Russia to extradite the three men. More than eight years after flight MH17 was downed by a Russian-made missile over eastern Ukraine, the court concluded that the missile was fired deliberately to down an aircraft, and that the target was a military aircraft rather than a civilian airliner. The two Russians, Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky, and the Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, were all prominent figures in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), established by so-called separatists when war broke out in eastern Ukraine months before MH17 was decommissioned. The court found that Russia had overall control over the DPR and that there was ample evidence of contacts with Moscow before and after the attack. All three were found guilty in absentia of mass murder and the downing of the plane. A fourth man who had legal representation at the trial, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted of all charges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vg-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n