On the morning of July 17, 2014, the Boeing 777-200ER was almost full. At 10:40 a.m., 283 passengers were seated on board, and the crew of fifteen was ready for takeoff. The plane was scheduled to fly for about twelve hours from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The flight did not even reach the halfway point of its journey, stopping in the skies over Ukraine at 1:15 p.m. and crashing at the point where three villages in the Donetsk Oblast meet: Hrabove, Rozsypne, and Petropavlivka. Until that day, the route had been considered safe, but this assessment was wrong, an underestimation, because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had already begun at that point, and flight MH17 was shot down by a missile. All 298 people on board were killed. The missile that hit the plane was a Buk missile fired by soldiers fighting for Russia. The search began, governments sprang into action, and independent research centers began investigating. From that moment on, the code MH17 ceased to exist, as is customary after plane crashes. But “MH17” should be the sound of a collective alarm bell, which unfortunately never rang. Only the Netherlands began a thorough process of investigation and soul-searching that led them to realize that they had underestimated the threats that a foreign power could pose to them. MH17 was a warning that did not sound loud enough, but for the Dutch it was a signal that they needed to work on their own security. Of course, the flight had been shot down far away, but it was a sign of war.
Skies of war
In 2014, Ukraine was attacked on three fronts: Moscow occupied the entire Crimean peninsula, sending soldiers without military insignia to occupy positions of power, taking institutions by force and organizing a referendum that was illegitimate in the eyes of the international community. Militias claiming to be separatists and pro-Russian had started a war on behalf of Russia against the regular Ukrainian army, creating the separatist republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The conflict had all the characteristics of an invasion: Russian soldiers were inside Ukrainian territory, Moscow’s secret services were working with the separatist militias, the separatists were receiving orders and weapons from the Russian army, and Buk surface-to-air missiles were among those weapons. The events in Ukraine were labeled a “low-intensity war”, a label that often condemns them to oblivion and underestimation: despite the deaths, the armies, the occupations, most Western countries continued to consider Russia a partner, while Ukraine was not seen as a country under attack. This assessment fostered the idea in Vladimir Putin that whatever he did, he would go unpunished. Many European countries saw the threat but downplayed it. The Netherlands, on the other hand, was among the minority that, having lost 193 compatriots, thought long and hard about the threat from Moscow, but without changing its relations with the Kremlin.
The convictions
It took eight years to bring the trial to a close. The Netherlands wanted to take charge of every aspect, participating in the creation of an investigative team that was initially kept secret, together with the European Agency for Judicial Cooperation, Australia, Belgium, and Ukraine. On November 17, 2022, nine months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine had begun, a Dutch court sentenced Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinski, and Leonid Kharchenko to life imprisonment in absentia. Karcheno is Ukrainian and in 2014 led a military unit supported by Moscow. Girkin and Dubinski are Russian and were working for the Moscow secret services at the time of the shooting down. After the conviction, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky commented: “The feeling of impunity leads to new crimes”. It is difficult not to see the war in Ukraine as an escalation of impunity.
Girkin aka Strelkov
Igor Girkin was one of Putin’s key men in the war against Kyiv. In 2014, he worked as a colonel in the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, and boasted of having fired the first shot of the war. He believed that the plan for total invasion should be carried out immediately, but Vladimir Putin decided to wait. Girkin remained in contact with the militias in Ukraine, became their leader, and commanded mercenaries, self-proclaimed separatists, and Russian soldiers. He was opposed to a silent war and wanted the attack on Ukraine to be a total war from the outset. When it became clear in 2022 that the Moscow army would have to revise its plans after failing to capture Kyiv, Girkin was convinced that the failure was the result of a lack of preparedness eight years earlier. In 2023, Girkin founded the Club of Angry Patriots – angry with Putin for the failure. Shortly afterwards, Girkin, known to everyone as Strelkov (meaning shooter, sniper), was arrested for extremism in Russia: MH17 obviously had nothing to do with it, it was the Kremlin’s fear of sedition.
The awakening
It was not only the downed flight that changed the country’s security policy. It was also the investigations that revealed a strong Russian intelligence presence on Dutch territory, and it was the sea, on whose seabed the most important infrastructure for the Netherlands lies. It is precisely in the sea that the country has invested, setting up a cutting-edge industry for monitoring and defending the seabed. Despite being hit in skies that were not their own, the Dutch decided that the North Sea could be both their strength and their weakness. When asked how much the focus on defense had changed after February 24, 2024, we received the following response from some industries that collaborate with the Defense Department: not much, we had started to change before, we had already had our shock. “Eighty-five percent of Dutch people consider Russia an aggressor: we have been deceived as a country and as Europe since the annexation of Crimea and the tragedy of flight MH17, which we remember well, and which Mark Rutte also reiterated during the NATO summit”, said Hero Brinkmann, a member of parliament from 2006 to 2012 and former member of the PVV, the far-right party led by Geert Wilders. Brinkmann left the PVV because he realized he had little in common with Wilders, Russia being one of those things. “Our support for Ukraine must be strengthened: so far, we have let Kyiv do the hard work for us. But the situation in the Dutch Parliament is more confusing: I don’t trust Wilders in this regard either, he has committed himself to Russia and I find it hard to understand why”. Moscow enters and exits national politics, and the Netherlands, which is heading to the polls, is no exception.
The government crisis
Wilders has decided to bring down the government led by his own party, hoping that in the early elections to be held in October, he will gain greater support and be able to form a less diverse coalition than the current one. He did not put it that way, of course, saying that he made promises to his voters and wants to keep them, but the others will not allow him to do so. Brinkmann tells us that “the polls showed the PVV in decline, while the PvdA-Groenlinks, the left-wing ecologists, were steadily rising. These are the main reasons for Wilders’ withdrawal from the government: he wants new elections to push hard on the issue of asylum seekers, hoping to regain electoral support”. But the traditional right, the VVD led by Dilan Yesilgöz-Zegerius, now says that promises don’t matter, what matters is that Wilders and his party are not reliable as rulers, and that there will be no coalition pact in the future. It’s not certain that this wall will hold, but for now it is compromising the calculations of the populist leader who inspires half of Europe.
The host
This year’s Atlantic Alliance summit was held in The Hague, the hometown of the new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, a long-serving prime minister who was chosen for his new role for two reasons: he is familiar with many heads of state and government and is one of the few considered capable of dealing with Donald Trump. Rutte went overboard with compliments for the American president, massaging his ego more than was necessary. He has a bit of an excessive nature. In 2022, he fell in love with the preparation of the NATO summit in Madrid and told a close aide: “When it’s our turn, we have to do the same. Start doing the math”. And here we are, with a European pillar of the Alliance bowing down to “daddy” so as not to upset him, who learned the Ukrainian lesson early on but is not reviewing it and risks forgetting it.
