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That the trial was unfair is indicated by the judge’s ruling that all evidence supplied by Dutch and Ukrainian state organizations was admissible in court; but all evidence supplied by Russian organizations were inadmissible.

On November 17, a Dutch court convicted two Russians, and a Ukrainian commander of a military unit in the Donetsk People’s Militia, in absentia for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.^[1]

The Russians are Igor Girkin, a 51-year-old former colonel in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), and his subordinate, Sergey Dubinsky, and Donetsk People’s Militia commander Leonid Kharchenko, who allegedly took orders from Dubinsky.^[2]

Russian Oleg Pulatov^[3]—the only defendant to employ an attorney—was acquitted at the trial for lack of evidence.

Dutch prosecutors acknowledged that the four defendants had not “press[ed] the button themselves,” but said that they had worked to get Buk missiles to the firing location.^[4]

Secretary of State Antony Blinken proclaimed after the verdict that the

“U.S. welcomes today’s decision finding three members of Russian proxy forces in eastern Ukraine guilty for their roles in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. The decision by the District Court of The Hague is an important moment in ongoing efforts to deliver justice for the 298 individuals who lost their lives on July 17, 2014.”

Justice was not actually delivered for the victims, however. The Dutch judge, Hendrik Steenhuis, ruled admissible evidence supplied by Dutch and Ukrainian state organizations and their military officers, intelligence agents, and police but not by Russian organizations because, he said, they are state agencies and “not clear, transparent, entirely unconvincing.”

Steenhuis admitted at the beginning of the trial, however, that bodies were tampered with by Ukrainian authorities at the scene of the crash, making clear that they were not transparent.

Ukrainian authorities also withheld communication between the MH17 pilots and Ukrainian air control, the radar tracking data at the Ukrainian air control center, and communication from the air controller in charge of MH17, and appear to have fabricated an audio tape purporting to show Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk bragging about shooting down the MH17 plane.^[5]

The U.S. for its part obstructed justice by refusing to provide satellite imagery from the crash it claimed to have after Judge Steenhuis demanded it, telling the court that it was willing to interpret the satellite images but not reveal them.^[6]

A Show Trial

Christopher Black, a veteran litigator in international war crimes trials, referred to the Dutch trial “as nothing more than a Ukrainian civil war fought by the Kyiv regime, with lawyers instead of soldiers. It’s a show trial. Nothing more than propaganda.”^[7]

According to Christelle Néant writing in the Donbass Insider, evidence presented by Russia that Judge Steenhuis refused to consider included the serial number from the Buk missile allegedly used in the shootdown, which indicated that the missile belonged to the Ukrainian Army.

Despite intensive overhead surveillance of Ukraine in 2014, U.S. and other Western intelligence services could find no evidence that Russia had ever given a Buk system to the rebels or introduced one into the area.^[8]

Image: Russian-made Buk system. [Source: consortiumnews.com]

Satellite intelligence reviewed both before and after the shoot-down only detected Ukrainian Buk missile systems in the conflict zone.

Dutch intelligence specified in a suppressed October 2015 report that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH17 at 33,000 feet belonged to the Ukrainian government.^[9]

Major General Onno Eichelsheim, Director of the Dutch Military Intelligence Service (MIVD), concluded—based on review of top-secret NATO and U.S. signals intelligence monitoring Russian military units—that flight MH17 was “flying beyond the range of all identified and operational Ukrainian and Russian locations where 9K37MI Buk M1 Systems were deployed.”^[10]

The Dutch court in 2022 suggested that the Buk was fired from a field near Pervomaysky, located on the border of the zone in eastern Ukraine controlled by the Ukrainian army, which was encircling and shelling Saur-Mogila next to it.

A former commander of the Donetsk People’s Militia told Néant—in a statement corroborated by a local villager named Valentina—that the Ukrainian Army was present on the outskirts of Stepanovka around Saur-Mogila at the time of the crash and that Ukrainian soldiers would have consequently seen and heard the shot from the Buk system and destroyed it, given their close proximity.

The same commander said that, if the Donetsk People’s Militia had a Buk system, they would never have installed it in Pervomaysky within range of Ukrainian artillery—with just a few soldiers to protect the device.

Rather, he told her, they would have installed it in Snezhnoye, to protect the town—which had been bombed the day before by the Ukrainian Air Force, which killed 12 civilians.

According to Valentina, the Buk in Stepanovka was too far away to hit MH17, and its trajectory was not consistent with where the plane was shot down.^[11]

The damage to the plane also was inconsistent with a hit from a missile as heavy as a Buk.^[12]

Source: dailymail.co.uk

The Buk was thus likely not the weapon—as the Dutch court and U.S. government officials claim.

The Lie That Shot Down MH17

John Helmer, the longest serving foreign correspondent in Russia, writes in his 2020 book, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, that “CT scans, x-rays, autopsy sections, and spectroscopic testing of metals…conducted in the Netherlands and verified in Australia, make the Buk story impossible.”^[13]

Helmer points out that a Buk warhead would have caused thousands of pieces of shrapnel to have been lodged in the bodies of the crash victims. The only shrapnel evidence discovered in the bodies of the MH17 victims, however, was confined to the three cockpit crew.^[14]

An Australian investigation led by Dr. David Ransom, a Victoria forensic pathologist, ruled out that the recorded injuries of the victims or cause of death “resulted from metal penetration of a Buk warhead or other ordinance.”^[15]

The Russians from the outset claimed that the MH17 was shot down in an air-to-air strike. This is consistent with numerous eyewitnesses in Rozspyne and Grabovo, who stated that they heard multiple aircraft around the time of the crash, and that one of the aircraft flew away.^[16]

Two of the eyewitnesses said that the other aircraft had to have been Ukrainian because they saw a Ukrainian fighter fall down, nose-up, behind a forest on Ukraine-controlled territory and saw two pilots descend by parachute.^[17]

Another witness reported to a Dutch police investigator in July 2015 that he had seen two Ukrainian Air Force fighter jets in the air at the time of the shootdown and a plume moving horizontally across the sky indicating an air-to-air missile launch, not a missile fired from the ground.^[18]

Rod from what experts believe is the air-to-air missile that shot down the MH17 flight. [Source: crimesofempire.com]

Russian radar readings significantly revealed the presence of a Ukrainian jet fighter “gaining height” as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH17, while a retired Lufthansa pilot, Peter Haisenko, analyzed photos which indicated that a side panel of the fuselage located next to the pilot was riddled with 30 mm bullets—which had to have come from a Ukrainian Su-25 plane, and not a ground-to-air missile.

Objects found in the pilots’ bodies were also believed to have been bullets—which would indicate Ukrainian responsibility since it had an Air Force when the Donetsk rebels did not.

Flight and Suicide

Russian media sources reported that the pilot responsible for shooting down the MH17, Lt. Col. Dmitro Yakatsuts of the elite 299 Squadron in the Ukrainian air force, fled afterwards to Dubai with a pretty air traffic controller named Anna Petrenko, who was allegedly in charge of the MH17 flight.

Another pilot allegedly responsible, Captain Vladyslav Voloshyn, committed suicide allegedly in March 2018.

U.S. Intelligence Concurs with Russian Assessment

U.S. intelligence analysts concurred with the Russian assessments, telling journalist Robert Parry that Flight MH17 was shot down by an air-to-air missile and that the Ukrainian government had something to do with it.

Likely it was rogue elements of the Ukrainian military tied to warlord Ihor Kholomoisky, who financed neo-Nazi militias that fought the Russian-backed rebels in Donetsk.^[19]

This corroborates the theory by local investigators that the MH17 was crippled by an air-to-air missile and finished off with cannon fire from a fighter that had been shadowing it as it plummeted to earth.

Source: readersupportednews.org

Ukrainian Obstruction

John Helmer recounts that, according to a Dutch investigator, when Ukrainian investigators came on the crash scene, one of them curiously received a call from the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs reminding him that they had an order not to study the site and send bodies to Kharkiv [in eastern Ukraine]. When the Dutch investigator refused the orders, he was fired.

Alexandr Gavrilyako, a prosecutor working at the time for the Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry, said:

“If they knew and believed that a crime had been committed by militias or members of the Russian Federation, then on the contrary, they would have given me and my investigators instructions to examine the scene and find evidence of the guilt of this or that person. But they gave the completely opposite instructions.”^[20]

Key Unanswered Question

A key unanswered question is why Kyiv Air Traffic Control, as part of the Ukraine Ministry of Aviation, ordered the MH17 to deviate from its scheduled route that avoided the war zone in eastern Ukraine.

Screenshot images from FlightAware.com compiled by Vagelis Karmiros who collated all the recent MH17 flight paths as tracked by FlightAware and shows that, while all ten most recent paths pass safely well south of the Donetsk region, and cross the zone above the Sea of Azov, it was only the tragic July 17 MH17 flight that passed straight overhead Donetsk. [Source: rt.com]

After the FlightAware data was initially published, the site changed its version of the trajectory of MH17. The question arises: Were they pressured to do so?

“Not Really Looking at the Causes of the Crash”

The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, expressed his belief in a documentary film that the claim that the Russians were responsible was invented from the start.

Emphasizing that Malaysian officials were stopped from reviewing the evidence, Mahathir said on May 26, 2019:

“They [Dutch, Australian and U.S. governments] never allowed us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept this kind of attitude. We are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone, irrespective of who is involved.”^[21]

A Highly Interesting Coincidence?

RT News reported that, just as was the case during the World Trade Center attacks of September 2001, there were military war games exercises taking place on the days before and right after the MH17 event, which could have provided a cover for a covert operation.^[22]

According to Wayne Madsen, NATO and the Ukraine military were involved in ten days of joint military “exercises,” code-named “Sea Breeze,” that included the use of electronic warfare and electronic intelligence aircraft such as the Boeing EA-18G Growler, which have the capability to jam radar systems in all surface-to-air threats, and the Boeing E3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).

Image: Boeing EA-18G Growler. [Source: jet-airlinezz.blogspot.com]

Sea Breeze, according to Madsen, included the AEGIS-class guided missile cruiser USS Vela Gulf. From the Black Sea, “the Vela Gulf was able to track Malaysia Airlines MH17 over the Black Sea as well as any missiles fired at the plane.” As well, U.S. AWACS electronic intelligence (ELINT) aircraft were also flying over the Black Sea region at the time of the MH17 fly-over of Ukraine.

Operation Trident was also taking place at the time of the MH17 shootdown involving airborne and air infantry troops from the U.S., Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada, Poland and Ukraine.

Spanish Air Traffic Controller Threatened

According to Madsen, a Spanish air traffic controller, who possessed knowledge of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s involvement in the shoot-down of MH17, reportedly had his life threatened by people he described as “Maidan” troops, a reference to the Maidan Square uprising that toppled the Ukrainian government in February 2014.

The Spanish controller, identified only as “Carlos,” understood that the shootdown of MH17 was carried out by supporters of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, both allies of Ihor Kolomoisky.

MI6 Psywar Operation

One of the first articles to allegedly break the story of the MH17 crash in the London Daily Mail quoted Dr. Igor Sutyagin, Research Fellow in Russian Studies from the Royal United Services Institute, who promoted the theory that MH17 had been shot down by rebels based in the 3^rd District of Torez in eastern Ukraine after mistaking the plane for a government military transport aircraft, and that the rebels had brought it down using a ground-to-air Buk missile system.

Sutyagin was a Russian nuclear weapons academic convicted and imprisoned in Moscow in 2004 for espionage, then released to the UK in a spy swap in July 2010 with Sergei Skirpal—the target of an alleged poisoning attack that was blamed on Russia, but which appears to have been part of a false-flag operation orchestrated by Great Britain, whose aim was to further the demonization of Vladimir Putin and promote further sanctions and regime-change efforts.

John Helmer writes that “Sutyagin’s appearance in the Daily Mail twenty four hours after the crash is the first public sign of British intelligence at work on the [MH17] case. The only sources Sutyagin had for what he told the newspaper were in, or working for British intelligence.”^[23]

Bellingcat

Another sign of a British intelligence operation was the role played by Bellingcat, a research institute that purveys disinformation in support of the new Cold War.

Bellingcat’s founder, Eliot Higgins, is a college dropout who made significant mistakes in an earlier investigation of the Syria-sarin case in 2013; he was for years treated as a savant on the MH17 case in the mainstream media while basing his analysis on dubious internet photographs that he used to blame Russia for the attacks.

Team Obama Adopts the Ukrainian Story…and Lies

Just over two hours after the MH17 crash, President Barack Obama spoke to Vladimir Putin, who informed Obama of a report received from air traffic controllers suggesting that the lethal explosion which took down the aircraft originated from the air, not from the ground.

After the call, Obama called Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and then quickly adopted the Buk story, the official position of the Foreign Ministry in Kyiv, absent any independent investigation.^[24]

On July 21, 2014, Obama stated on national television that the Malaysia Airlines plane, “was shot down over territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine,” and that Russia both trained the separatists and “armed them with military equipment and weapons, including anti-aircraft weapons.” William Engdahl wrote that Obama’s speech “brought the entire world one giant step closer to a Cold War with Russia that easily could become a hot war.”

The same was true for statements made by Secretary of State John Kerry on July 20 on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Kerry claimed that he had “seen U.S. satellite imagery of the attack on the MH17 flight [which has never been released^[25]]—the launch of a ground-based missile, its flight, and then detonation beside the civilian aircraft in flight.” Kerry continued:

“We picked up the imagery of this launch, we know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing…And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft [MH17] disappeared from the radar. We also know from voice identification [a Ukrainian fabrication that was also ambiguous] that the separatists were bragging about shooting it down afterwards.”^[26]

When Thomas Schansman, father of a U.S.-Dutch citizen killed in the crash, wrote to Kerry in 2016 requesting information about the satellite images Kerry claimed to have viewed, Kerry, tellingly, was evasive. Schansman told Robert Parry that the message was “clear. No answer on my request to hand over satellite and/or radar data to DSB [Dutch Safety Board] or public.”^[27]

DNI Repeats Kerry’s Lies

On July 22, 2014, two days after Kerry’s appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, authorized the release of a brief report repeating Kerry’s allegations. It referred to “an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; claimed that Russia “continues to provide training including on air defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia”; and noted that the rebels “have demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”

Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report actually said was that the rebels had previously only used short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH17 was flying at approximately 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.^[28]

Samantha Power Adds Her Condemnation of Russia

The key government figure responsible for presenting the Buk story as the official U.S. government “assessment” was then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power.^[29] Power was author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2003), which lamented past American inaction in the face of genocide, and was a hawk in the Obama administration pushing for military intervention in Libya to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi on supposed humanitarian grounds.

In an emergency session of the UN Security Council on July 18, 2014, Power gave an emotional speech blaming Russia for killing women and children on board the MH17 flight. She flat-out lied when she claimed that “Russian-backed separatists prevented investigators from gaining full and timely access to the crash site,” when in reality it was Ukraine that had done so.

Journalist Alexander Nettyosov reported having spent several days with Donetsk law enforcement who, he said, “fulfilled their duties to the last, in spite of the fact that Ukraine had all but abandoned its responsibilities and tried a variety of administrative and psychological measures first to delay the investigation, and then to stop it altogether.”^[30]

War Plans

Buoyed by Power’s emotional testimony before the UN, which included the shedding of tears for the victims, President Obama and his advisers spent at least a week after the MH17 crash and as much as three weeks planning to send up to 9,000 combat troops into eastern Ukraine.^[31]

The scheme—which was leaked by an Australian Army captain—was to have involved Dutch and Australian army units, with German ground and U.S. air support, plus NATO direction.

Source: 21^stcenturywire.com

James Brown, head of research at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney, said that the plan—which had Australia’s National Security Committee meeting every day for more than three weeks—would have consumed the bulk of the Australian Army.^[32]

The official pretext for the invasion would have been to secure the MH17 crash site, but the real agenda was to defeat the separatist movement in the Donbas, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.^[33]

According to Dutch sources, the military plan of attack was aborted when Germany refused to participate directly, or allow its bases or airspace to be used. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the Dutch were pulling their troops out of the plan on July 27, 2014.

As a consolation prize, the U.S. and EU officials, on July 29, 2014, announced the imposition of new sanctions on Russia, which were the first to commence economic and trade warfare against Russian banks and the Russian ship-building sector. This was all part of a regime-change strategy designed to undermine the nationalist Putin and replace him with a pliable leader like Boris Yeltsin who had opened the Russian economy to foreign exploitation in the 1990s.^[34]

Flight MH17 and the New Cold War

In his book Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester University Press, 2018), Dutch scholar Kees van der Pijl points out that on the eve of the crash, Putin had been promoting economic integration with Germany to the chagrin of the U.S. foreign policy elite and advancing a land for gas deal with German Chancellor Angela Merkel bolstered by the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline that would enable Russia to supply Germany with natural gas.

The MH17 crash had the effect of preventing this new arrangement and ending tripartite talks between Vladimir Putin, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the gas deal and in which Russia had promised to compensate Ukraine for the loss of rental income for the Russian naval base at Sevastopol and drop objections to a free trade agreement with the EU in exchange for Ukraine agreeing not to pursue NATO membership.

The MH17 crash also helped secure EU support for U.S. sanctions that had been levied on Ukraine the day before, while helping to validate an escalation of U.S. military intervention in Ukraine, which was already considerable to that point.^[35]

Was Putin the Intended Target?

Robert Parry said that he was told by his intelligence source that U.S. analysts looked seriously at the possibility that the intended target of the attack on the MH17 was President Putin’s official plane returning from a state visit to South America. His aircraft and MH17 had similar red-white-and-blue markings, but Putin took a more northerly route and arrived safely in Moscow.

A side-by-side comparison of the Russian presidential jetliner and the Malaysia Airlines plane. [Source: consortiumnews.com]

Other possible scenarios were that a poorly trained and undisciplined Ukrainian squad mistook MH17 for a Russian plane that had penetrated Ukrainian airspace or that the attack was a willful provocation designed to be blamed on the Russians.

Classic Piece of Strategic Communication

Parry wrote in 2016 that the MH17 case was deployed like a classic piece of “strategic communication,”  mixing propaganda with psychological operations to put an adversary—Russia and Vladimir Putin—at a disadvantage.^[36]

The Dutch MH17 trial and verdict is obviously a continuation of the psyops at a time when the anti-Russian demonization campaign has greatly expanded and when a potential hot war with Russia appears to be on the horizon.

During the 1930s, the term “show trial” was invented to describe politicized court proceedings in Stalinist Russia in which a guilty verdict for those accused of sabotaging the Soviet state was never in doubt. Now the term is most appropriate in the West where evidence and facts do not matter in legal proceedings that are designed to mobilize public support for World War III.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Flight MH17 was going from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. All 298 people on board were killed, including 80 children. 

2. Girkin was Minister of Defense in the Donetsk People’s Republic. 
3. Pulatov was deputy head of the intelligence service in Donetsk. 
4. John Helmer, with Max van der Werff, Liane Theuerkauf and Sam Bullard, The Lie That Shot Down MH17 (John Helmer, 2020), 399. 
5. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 107, 421; William Engdahl, “Ukraine MH17 may be CIA false flag and it ain’t flying,” RT News, August 1, 2014, https://www.rt.com/op-ed/177388-mh17-cia-false-ukraine/. The rebels could have been bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian Su-25 which was shot down some hours earlier; the tapes are unclear which aircraft they are referring to that had been shot down. Sergey Dubinsky stated in an interview that the conversation recorded in the tapes was from before the MH17 crash and that the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) had “edited it a lot.” Malaysian and German voice recording experts confirmed that the tape had been tampered with. 
6. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 521. 
7. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 580. 
8. Parry wrote: “If Russian-supplied Buks had been spotted and the batteries of four 16-foot-long missiles hauled around by trucks that are hard to miss their presence surely would have been noted.” 
9. The rebels, the report said, lacked that capacity. 
10. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 397, 407. The U.S. hence knew that the Buk missile could not have shot down MH17—though nevertheless has claimed that it did. Eichelsheim said that “these locations [where the Buk missile was allegedly placed] are in the immediate vicinity of large population centers, and the landed missile would most likely have led to messages on social media or other public media. MIVD is not aware of such publications.” 
11. Almaz-Antey Corporation, the Russian arms manufacturer of the Buk system, conducted its own experiments to determine the likely firing location and placed it near the village of Zaroshchenskoye in an area under Ukrainian government control. 
12. Kees van der Pijl, Flight MH17: Ukraine and the new Cold War: Prism of Disaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 134. 
13. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 159. 
14. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 87. 
15. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 142. 
16. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 61, 395. The eyewitness testimony is preserved in the Prosector’s office of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). 
17. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 61. 
18. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 397. Numerous other witnesses said that they saw Ukrainian military planes and that the planes shot a missile which led to the explosion of the MH17. The Ukrainian military jet, they specified, was flying below the civilian MH17 airliner. Residents also specified that it was impossible for the plane to have been shot down by a Buk missile in the way the official narrative holds. 
19. Kholomoisky also financed the political rise of Ukraine’s current president Volodymyr Zelensky. 
20. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 39. 
21. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 368. 
22. On war games exercises on 9/11, see Ray McGinnis, Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored (Vancouver, B.C.: Northern Star Publications, 2021), 113, 114. McGinnis notes that the scenario for one of the war games on 9/11, Amalgam Virgo One, involved a suicide pilot attacking a military building, while Fertile Rice featured Osama bin Laden directing a drone filled with explosives to target Washington, D.C. Two other games, Vigilant Guardian and Global Guardian, had a photo of bin Laden on the cover of their documents and featured a script where terrorists hijacked a plane in order to attack Manhattan. 
23. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 43. 
24. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 155, 156. 
25. Onno Eichelsheim, Director of the Dutch Military Intelligence Service (MIVD), claimed that these images actually revealed that Flight MH17 flew beyond the range of any Buk missiles, hence discrediting Kerry’s statements and proving him to be a liar. During the Vietnam War, Kerry had eloquently called out high-level government officials like Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara for the lies that had been used to promote the war; but now Kerry had become McNamara, selling his soul for the trappings of power. 
26. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 418. 
27. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 495. 
28. The DNI never expressed certainty that Russian-backed rebels were behind the shooting down of the aircraft, claiming at one point that it was possible the missile that struck the plane was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems. 
29. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 160. 
30. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 51. Noting that Russia was most interested in a transparent investigation, Nettyosov added that, “unfortunately, the work of the Donetsk investigators who spent two days on the Boeing 777 crash site was not used by anybody.” He continued: “If Ukraine were interested in investigating this case in which, according to the official Kyiv version, both the local militias and Russia were implicated, nobody would have held us up. Rather, to the contrary, they’d be asking us to leave no stone unturned to find every last piece of evidence, monitoring my every move, confident in my thoroughness and professional ability.” Nettyosov noted further that there is little reason to point to the militias—as downing a Boeing would brand them as international terrorists, and was also beyond their capacity. Some of the militia members, he said, were “carrying hunting shotguns.” 
31. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 257. 
32. Idem.
33. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 385, 386. 
34. Helmer, The Lie That Shot Down MH17, 257, 261; Jeremy Kuzmarov, “‘A New Battlefield for the United States’: Russia Sanctions and the New Cold War,” Socialism and Democracy, 33, 3 (2019). 
35. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17, 99, 114, 115. Mark Leonard, founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted in a newspaper interview “without MH17 it would have been pretty difficult to find sufficient support for the increased sanctions on the Russian economy.” 

36. Van der Pijl, Flight MH17. 

Featured image: Source: johnhelmer.net