'Harbouring murderers': Russia protects perpetrators of MH17 downing

SYDNEY, Australia -- Australia's foreign minister on Friday (November 18) urged Russia to surrender three men found guilty of shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and called out President Vladimir Putin for "harbouring murderers."

A Dutch court on Thursday sentenced the three men to life imprisonment over the 2014 downing of the Malaysia Airlines flight over Ukraine.

Russians Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko were found guilty in absentia of shooting down the Boeing 777 with a Russian-supplied missile, killing all 298 passengers on board.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the verdict confirmed the "Russian Federation has responsibility".

"We call on Russia to surrender those convicted so they may face the court's sentence for their heinous crimes," she told reporters.

"No amount of avoidance, obfuscating, or disinformation from the Russian Federation can avoid that fact."

Wong said Russia's refusal to hand over the men was ultimately a damning indictment on Putin's character.

"We would say to Russia the world knows that you're harbouring murderers and that says something about you Mr. Putin," she later told national broadcaster ABC.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, speaking on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Bangkok, said Russia should hand over the perpetrators of "this atrocious act of terrorism".

"Our thoughts today are with the families and friends who lost loved ones in that atrocity," he told reporters.

"We call upon Russia to hand over, for justice, the people who were involved and who were found guilty in absentia."

Moscow has shrugged off the verdict as politically motivated, while Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy -- battling a full-scale Russian invasion after years of low-level fighting in the east -- has praised it as "important".

The trial represents the end of a long search for justice for the victims of the disaster, who came from 10 countries, including 196 Dutch, 43 Malaysians and 38 Australian residents.

Overwhelming evidence

The evidence against the separatists, who attacked eastern Ukraine in 2014 with the backing of Russian forces and mercenaries, is overwhelming.

The missile used to destroy the plane came from a Russian BUK anti-aircraft system, investigators found, as reported by the US think-tank Atlantic Council and many other sources.

That specific BUK launcher belonged to the Russian army's 53rd Antiaircraft Missile Brigade, based in Kursk, investigators concluded in 2018, citing satellite images and one photo posted on social media, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

Most damning, Igor Girkin, a separatist commander, or his proxy posted a message to the VKontakte social network 90 minutes after the plane's last radio contact, boasting, "We just downed a plane, an AN-26," a reference to a military cargo plane and an indication that the separatists thought they had downed a Ukrainian military asset, according to the New Yorker.

Although Girkin rapidly took down the post, the US nonprofit Internet Archive had saved it for posterity on the Wayback Machine site.