For the decade after MH17 was shot out of the sky over Ukraine, justice proved elusive.
As journalists investigated, then prosecutors, then a Dutch court, and, on Monday, a UN agency, steadily more fingers pointed at Russia and Vladimir Putin.
While the new ruling doesn’t bring immediate consequences for the 2014 attack, which killed 298 people, it could still harm Putin.
The decision, by the multinational Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization, could darken opinions of Putin in countries where he is still admired.
It could – one day – also lead to Russia paying out for the shootdown.
MH17, a Malaysia Airlines service from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down on 17 July, 2014, by a surface-to-air missile.
The strike came from a Russian launcher active in eastern Ukraine, which even then was a scene of bloody fighting between Ukrainian forces and separatists supported by Moscow.
The ruling amplifies diplomatic pressure on Russia and is notable as another Russian breach of international law, said Stephen Hall, a professor in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics at the University of Bath.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a forum in Moscow in April, 2025. (Photo: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik/AP)“The fact that the international organization that represents the world community has come out and said this, I think, does put pressure on the Kremlin at least to try and find a way around the tarnishing of its image,” Hall said.
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“It does show that even the United Nations has come out and seen from the evidence that they were able to find from MH17 that the Kremlin was behind this.”
The Kremlin had rejected the findings of a 2022 trial in the Netherlands, was home to around 200 of the victims, that Russia was to blame.
Hall said that “the Kremlin could hide behind the idea that the Dutch were an unfriendly country because they support Nato and support Ukraine in the war.”
But, he said, “it’s very hard for them to be able to do the same about the United Nations, although I have already seen that they are desperately trying, claiming that the United Nations is now a servant of America.”
Presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis, other trial judges and lawyers view the reconstructed wreckage of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, at the Gilze-Rijen military airbase, southern Netherlands in May, 2021 (Photo: Peter Dejong/AP)The ruling also helps dispel false claims from the Kremlin that Ukraine was responsible, Hall said.
“It’s also a way to highlight to the international community, and particularly the Global South, that Russia is indicted for this, that this is something that the Kremlin has been involved in and that… this is an instance of a Russian war crime,” Hall said.
A way to make Russia pay
The UN agency ruling could also prove significant in setting the stage for frozen Russian assets to be used for reparations, Hall said.
Many Russian assets have been locked down in other countries since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The EU and other nations have considered using them, even against Russia’s will, to fund reparations for Ukraine.
Hall said the UN could potentially do the same here, arguing that Russia would never volunteer compensation while Putin is in charge.
“So it’s certainly difficult, but it’s at least a legal indictment of the Kremlin, of Russia, of Putin, and perhaps in the future… there may be some reckoning,” he said.
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