What is not in dispute
On 17 July 2014 a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur came apart in the air over Donetsk Oblast. Two hundred and ninety-eight people were killed, most of them Dutch.
It was brought down by a Buk surface-to-air missile. That is not a contested finding, and the reason it is worth saying plainly is that the company which builds the Buk agrees with it. Almaz-Antey, the Russian state manufacturer, ran its own investigation and reached the same conclusion about the weapon: a 9M38-series missile carrying a 9N314M warhead, detonating outside the aircraft near the cockpit. The Dutch Safety Board got there by a different route, from the distinctively shaped fragments recovered from the wreckage and from the bodies of the flight crew.
So the argument has never really been about what happened to the aeroplane. It has been about a field.
The Dutch Safety Board
The board published its final report on 13 October 2015. It established the weapon, established that the warhead detonated above and to the left of the cockpit, and identified an area of about 320 square kilometres in eastern Ukraine from which the missile could have come.
Then it stopped. The board's remit is aviation safety rather than blame, and it declined to say who fired. That restraint is worth noticing, because the report is often cited as though it had named a culprit. It is more useful than that: a technical finding that every side of the political argument has had to work around rather than dismiss.
The criminal case
The criminal investigation was run jointly by the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine. It concluded that the launcher had been brought into Ukraine from Russian territory and taken back across afterwards, and in 2018 traced the system to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade at Kursk.
On 17 November 2022 the District Court of The Hague convicted Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Leonid Kharchenko of the murder of all 298 people aboard and sentenced them to life. All three were tried in absentia and none is likely to serve the sentence.
The court was careful about a point that the reporting tends to flatten. It convicted the three for their part in bringing the system into position — not for firing it. On who actually launched the missile, it found the evidence insufficient.
The competing accounts
Two alternative explanations came from the Russian side, and the important thing about them is that they are not the same explanation. They are incompatible with each other.
The fighter aircraft. On 21 July 2014, four days after the crash, the Ministry of Defence held a briefing presenting radar data which it said showed a Ukrainian Air Force Su-25 closing to within three to five kilometres of the airliner. This version was quietly dropped. It sits badly with the physical evidence: a fighter's cannon or air-to-air missile does not produce the fragmentation pattern that was recovered from the wreckage, and the Su-25's service ceiling is well below the altitude MH17 was cruising at.
The other field. The more durable version keeps the Buk and moves it. Almaz-Antey, presenting in June 2015, accepted the missile type and the warhead and argued from the fragmentation geometry that the launch point was near Zaroshchenske, about twenty kilometres west of the site the Joint Investigation Team identified — which is to say, in territory then held by Ukrainian forces. In September 2016 the Ministry of Defence produced further radar data, which it said had been discovered during scheduled maintenance, pointing the same way.
The second is the serious one. It concedes the physics and disputes the geography, which is a narrower and far more testable claim than a fighter aircraft. It is also the reason the argument has stayed alive: a disagreement about a launch site cannot be settled by looking at the wreckage.
What open-source work added
Much of what is now known about the launcher's movements did not come from any government. Bellingcat and others worked from photographs and video that had been posted publicly at the time — a Buk on a low-loader moving through Donetsk, the same vehicle photographed at points along a route, a launcher with a distinctively damaged side skirt.
That work identified a specific vehicle, Buk 332 of the 53rd brigade, and reported finding no credible evidence that any operational Ukrainian Buk was within range that day. It also examined the Ministry of Defence's own material and concluded that satellite imagery the ministry presented had been altered and that a video it placed in one location had been filmed in another.
This is the genuinely unusual part of the MH17 record. A great deal of it is checkable by anyone who wants to: the photographs are still online, the geolocations can be repeated, the shadows can be measured against the time of day.
What happened after the verdict
The Hague judgment was a criminal conviction of three individuals. It did not settle the question of state responsibility, and two international bodies have since taken that up.
An attempt to do it early failed. On 29 July 2015, a year after the crash, Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands and Ukraine put a resolution to the UN Security Council to establish an international tribunal. Eleven of the fifteen members voted for it. China, Angola and Venezuela abstained. Russia vetoed it, and the tribunal was never created.
The route that eventually worked went around the Council rather than through it. The Netherlands and Australia brought a case against Russia in 2022 under the Chicago Convention, the treaty governing international civil aviation, and on 12 May 2025 the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization found Russia responsible for the downing. It was the first time in ICAO's history that its Council decided the merits of a dispute between member states under that mechanism. Russia filed an appeal against the decision in September 2025.
Two months after the ICAO ruling, on 9 July 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered its judgment in the inter-state case brought by Ukraine and the Netherlands. It held unanimously that Russia was responsible for the downing and for the deaths of everyone aboard. It also found Russia responsible for additional suffering caused to the families — specifically by its continued denial of involvement and its obstruction of the investigations. The judgment runs to nearly five hundred pages and covers far more than MH17.
Neither ruling produces a person in a cell. What they change is the character of the dispute: it is no longer only a Dutch court and a five-country investigation on one side, but the UN's civil aviation body and the Council of Europe's court as well, each reaching the finding through its own procedure.
Where it stands
There is a technical finding from a safety board, a criminal conviction from a national court, a five-country investigation behind it, findings of state responsibility from ICAO and from the European Court of Human Rights, and a set of alternative accounts from a state that did not take part in the prosecution, does not extradite its nationals, has vetoed a tribunal, and has never formally withdrawn either version it offered.
What the record does not contain is the answer to the question most people actually ask, which is who fired. The court said so itself. That gap is real and acknowledged in the judgment, and it is a different thing from the claim that the wrong country has been blamed — the first is an absence the court wrote down, the second is an argument that has to contend with the wreckage, the fragments, the phone intercepts and a decade of photographs.