There was no fighter plane around when MH17 was shot down on 17 July 2014, according to the Dutch court that conducted the MH17 criminal trial. Wasn’t there? The defendants clearly spoke about a Sukhoi fighter that brought down MH17 shortly after the crash.
Something startling happened during the June 26, 2020 MH17 court hearing in The Netherlands. The prosecutor's office released a recording of an intercepted conversation between Igor Girkin and his MH17 co-defendant Sergey Dubinsky. In it, the latter reported that a "Sushka" (nickname for a Sukhoi fighter jet) had downed a passenger plane and that subsequently the separatists had hit the Sushka with a Buk missile. "The Sushka fucking hit the Boeing," Dubinsky's voice echoes. "And ours fucking hit the Sushka with a Buk." To which Girkin says, "Frankly speaking I don’t believe in this much." Dubinsky then closes the conversation with the prophetic words, "Anyway they will put the blame for the downing on us."
It was unclear what the prosecution wanted to demonstrate with this conversation that was allegedly conducted at 7:54 p.m., a few hours after the disaster. For although Dubinsky spoke of a Buk with which the separatists had fired on the 17th; he also spoke of a Ukrainian Sushka that had hit MH17. Anything but proof, then, of the prosecution's so-called ‘main scenario’, in which there was no Ukrainian fighter plane involved, let alone one that shot down MH17.
The phone conversation between Dubinsky and Girkin was not an isolated incident. Their conversation had been preceded by conversations with the same content conducted by the other two suspects, the prosecution made clear during subsequent hearings. That a Sushka had been shot down after it had downed a Boeing, Dubinsky had learned from Oleg Pulatov at 7:52 p.m.. He had not seen that himself, Pulatov told him, but others had. Before that, at 6:44 p.m., Pulatov had conveyed the same message to Leonid Kharchenko, two and a half hours hence after the disaster.
The Prosecution stressed several times that shortly after the disaster there was no passenger plane at all under discussion, only a Sushka. To this end, the prosecution repeatedly referred to a conversation allegedly held at 4:48 p.m. in which Kharchenko reports to Dubinsky, "We have already downed a Sushka" - to which Dubinsky exclaims, "Well done! That's the way I like to hear it!" Indeed, Kharchenko then makes no mention of a passenger plane. But what does this mean? That MH17 was mistaken for a Sushka? And that the separatists, when they heard about a downed Boeing, did not immediately realize that the Buk they had brought in was responsible for it?
Indeed, the prosecution assumes that the crew of a Russian Buk rig made a mistake and mistook MH17 for a military aircraft. However, the prosecution did not provide any substantiation for this so-called ‘mistake scenario’. It only suggested it, referring to public utterances in separatist circles shortly after the disaster. They allegedly claimed in the media and on social networking sites the downing of a Ukrainian military aircraft, not knowing that it was a passenger aircraft. This is a false suggestion. In fact, the first to report that a Ukrainian aircraft had been shot down was a pro-Kiev Twitter account. What is also certain is that there are no intercepts in which an admission of guilt or presumption of guilt can be heard. Nowhere is there any mention of the involvement of the own people's defense or a Russian Buk crew. In fact there are many conversations from shortly after the disaster of separatists asking each other what happened because they really had no idea. (These conversations were revealed in court by the lawyers of Pulatov.) But also, then, there are the telephone conversations about a Sukhoi fighter plane being the culprit.
Girkin and also Dubinsky do not seem to have immediately given credence to Pulatov's account "Sushka shoots Boeing and Buk shoots Sushka. For after Girkin expresses his doubts to Dubinsky ("Frankly speaking I don’t believe in this much.") the latter checks with Kharchenko at 7:59 p.m. whether what Pulatov has told him is true. "Are you sure our people saw that he was hit by a Sushka?" asks Dubinsky about the downed Boeing. "Or was it the work of our people after all?" Kharchenko then says that the downed Sushka was the culprit. Because first a bang sounded in the sky and "our bang" came after it. A parachute was also seen, Kharchenko said. The pilot of the Sushka had used his ejection seat.
There was no fighter plane, however, is the prosecution's firm belief, let alone that MH17 was brought down by a fighter plane. To this end, the prosecution referred to the logbooks and flight plans of the Ukrainian air force on June 9, 2020, among other things. "According to Ukrainian authorities, several flights took place on July 17, 2014, but all military aircraft were on the ground at the time MH17 was shot down." No other aircraft is also visible in the vicinity of MH17 on the primary radar data provided by Russia and Ukraine, the prosecution further noted. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) previously reported in its 2015 final report that, judging from the last two minutes of audio from the cockpit voice recorder, the pilots of the Malaysian Boeing did not see anything coming towards them. Moreover, the recorded communications between the Russian air traffic controller and his Ukrainian colleague, an excerpt of which the prosecution showed at the June 9, 2020 hearing, show that, prior to, during and after the disaster, they made no mention of the presence of an unknown aircraft in the vicinity of MH17. After the aircraft disappeared from the radar, the Russian air traffic controller still looked back at the primary radar images at 16:36, but saw nothing that could explain the disappearance of MH17. Furthermore, to the prosecution's knowledge, no wreckage from a downed Sukhoi fighter jet was found on July 17.
The court concurred with the prosecution's conclusion that there was no fighter plane. "Just as Girkin himself indicated during his conversation with Dubinsky, the court considers the scenario proposed by Dubinsky and Pulatov completely implausible, if only because no Sushka was shot down that day," the court ruled on Nov. 17, 2022. "Moreover, both Ukrainian and Russian radar images show that no Sushka or other fighter plane was flying in the airspace in question. Rather, what must be inferred from these telephone conversations is that the Buk missile actually ís fired and shot something out of the sky. Initially it was apparently assumed that it was a Sushka, but when it turned out that it was a large civilian aircraft, the aforementioned scenario was disseminated."
Is it true that there was no fighter plane? Oleg Pulatov's lawyers have repeatedly called attention to - what they call - the ‘warplane scenario’ and the ‘human-shield scenario’. They believe there may well have been a fighter plane around the time MH17 went down. In the warplane scenario, a fighter plane shot at MH17 with an airplane gun, a missile or both. In the human-shield scenario, a Ukrainian fighter plane flew in front of MH17 to avoid being shot at from the ground. The Ukrainian air force would have had a hand in this. They conducted bombing raids every time passenger planes passed. According to the lawyers, the prosecution's case file contained sufficient evidence for both scenarios. They blamed the prosecution and the JIT for not having investigated this sufficiently.
More about this in another blogpost in this series.
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