People walk among the debris of MH17 near the village of Grabovo, in eastern Ukraine, a year ago. Photo / AP
People walk among the debris of MH17 near the village of Grabovo, in eastern Ukraine, a year ago. Photo / AP
A year after Malaysian airliner brought down over Ukraine, questions remain about the true culprits.
The biggest pieces of wreckage have vanished, hauled away to the Netherlands for analysis, and green stalks of grass are poking through the burned ground where the centre section exploded.
But a year after Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was destroyed above eastern Ukraine, the shadow of death still hangs over Petropavlivka, Grabovo and Rosipnoye, the villages where the 298 victims, among them 193 Dutch, fell to earth.
Underfoot, fragments of melted metal litter the black earth, and a faint smell still hangs in the air - a mixture of aviation fuel and decaying bodies. "When the wind is in the west the houses next to the crash site get it worst," says Vladimir Berezhnoi, the Mayor of Grabovo.
"We still find things. Fragments - not flesh, because the birds got to them. But teeth, fingers, bones of course. I was working some land at the end of May and found a passport - Dutch, I think - and a mobile phone. It still worked."
For locals, the tragedy that unfolded was just one particularly horrible episode in the 15-month nightmare of the war between pro-Russian separatists and Ukraine.
The tragedy of MH17 is likely to take centre stage in a geopolitical showdown between Russia and the West.
A technical air accident inquiry led by the Dutch Safety Board is expected to release its final report into the MH17 disaster in October. A separate criminal investigation by Dutch, Australian, Belgian, Malaysian and Ukrainian detectives will probably run on until the end of the year.
But while Dutch and Malaysian diplomats have called for an international tribunal to punish the culprits, Russia has hinted it may veto such a move.
But a wealth of evidence has already emerged - photographs and video, satellite analysis, and witness testimony gathered by investigators and media organisations - that suggests that Russian-backed separatists fired a Buk SA-11 missile and brought down MH17.
That evidence leads to a tiny village in the rolling countryside 20km to the southeast of the crash site. About 1.5km east of the village of Chervonyi Zhovten, a fire incinerated the wheat in a field a year ago this week. On July 17, Varya Kovalyenko was tending a potato patch in her garden when she heard a roaring sound. Looking up, she saw a rocket "like a match" come flying over the rooftops of the village.
Ukrainian troops on the move near Krasnoarmiisk, Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, this week. Photo / AP
"It flew from over there, in a straight line that way," she said, indicating an arc to the east of the village.
The rocket Kovalyenko saw flew northwest, into clouds in the direction of Grabovo. Moments later, she saw a pall of black smoke rising.
"And then friends started to call and say a plane had been shot down."
Petr Fedotov, who lives at the other end of the village, said he was certain that the rocket that shot down MH17 had been launched from the burned field 1.5km to the east.
"There were other people there who saw it. Civilians."
Both Fedotov's and Kovalyenko's accounts fit with the photographic evidence. Taken by a resident of the nearby town of Torez and posted on Twitter two hours after the crash, the image showed a vertical column of white smoke that the publisher, a friend of the photographer, claimed showed a missile trail. Witnesses also place a separatist-controlled Buk missile system in the area on that day.
"I saw the Buk with my own eyes. The whole damned town saw it," said a former rebel fighter who was at home in Snizhne, 5km to the north of Chervonyi Zhovten, that day.
"It drove south towards Saur Mogila." An analysis of all available photographic and video material by Bellingcat, an investigative journalism group, shows the missile launcher had left separatist-held Donetsk, about 65km west of Snizhne, that morning. Officials at the Donetsk People's Republic still insist they had no technology capable of downing MH17.
"The Ukrainian aircraft we shot down were all at a much lower altitude, and to say that we had high-altitude SAM [surface-to-air] systems is a lie," said Eduard Basurin, a military spokesman for the Donetsk People's Republic. Basurin acknowledged that the separatists had captured Buk systems when they overran a Ukrainian base near Donetsk airport in June 2014, but said they turned out to be "only good for scrap".
He said the Ukrainians had shot down MH17 from south of Shakhtarsk.
"No one has any evidence - not America, not France, not England," Basurin said. It is a forthright denial. But it contradicts an emerging narrative that makes military sense.
In July last year, Ukrainian and Russian-backed forces were engaged in a struggle for control of Saur Mogila, 6.5km to the south of the suspected launch site in which the Ukrainians used air power to bomb separatist positions.
In response, the separatists had deployed sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry, downing several Ukrainian aircraft. The Buk seen in Snizhne before the crash appears to have been the latest addition to those defences, and the decision to fire it at MH17 a horrendous case of mistaken identity.
If Basurin is telling the truth about the state of the captured Ukrainian systems, there is only one place the Buk could have come from. If the missile that was fired on July 17 was supplied by the Russian Army and crewed by Russian soldiers, ultimate responsibility for MH17 lies with the commander in chief of the Russian armed forces, Vladimir Putin.
Where was it flying: From Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
What happened: US officials concluded the passenger jet was hit by a missile and shot down over Ukraine, on July 17, 2014.
Who died: There were 298 victims, including 193 Dutch.
Who was responsible: A final report from investigators has yet to be released. CNN reports that Dutch accident investigators say that evidence points to pro-Russian rebels as being responsible. The report says it was a Russian surface-to-air Buk missile that was used, launched from a village in Russian rebel controlled territory, CNN said.
What else is being investigated: The Dutch Safety Board is probing the decision-making process pertaining to safety when determining flight routes. Ukraine was a conflict zone when the incident happened and some airlines were avoiding it.
