Justice Eludes 298 Killed in the Shoot-Down of Malaysia Air Flight 17
Destroyed by a Russian-made missile three years ago over Ukraine, families of the victims still await a reckoning.
Debris from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shown smouldering in a field in Grabovo, Ukraine, on July 17, 2014.
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On a sunny July afternoon in 2014, a Russian-made surface-to-air missile detonated just feet from a Malaysia Airlines flight at its cruising altitude. The explosion sent hundreds of pieces of high-energy shrapnel through the Boeing 777, which broke apart and crashed in farmland in eastern Ukraine. All 298 people aboard were killed.
Three years later, the families of the passengers and crew still await a judicial reckoning, one which has been stymied by Russia’s efforts at the United Nations to block an international tribunal modeled after the one used in the 1988 terrorist bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.