‘Why did they kill my child?’

All three had relatives who had boarded Malaysia Airlines flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July 2014 to go on holiday. Two hours and 49 minutes into the flight, however, their Boeing 777-200ER was shot down by a Buk anti-aircraft missile over the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” (DPR), a region of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists. All 298 people on board — 15 crew members and 283 passengers — were killed, 80 of them minors. The war in Ukraine that nobody was yet calling a war was in its third month.

That evening, the lives previously known to Silene, Anton, Robbert and thousands of others like them suddenly came to an end and new ones began — ones marked by a tragedy they would never forget, never break free from, and that they would be forced to live with forever.

The first person to report that a plane had been downed that day, half an hour after MH17 crashed to earth, was the DPR’s then-Defence Minister Igor Strelkov, also known as Girkin, who posted about the crash online, though he initially thought it was an Antonov An-26 transport plane that had been shot down. 

Multiple sources, including Novaya Gazeta, said that Girkin had revelled in news of the downed plane, saying the DPR had issued warnings to steer clear of its air space. When he realised the plane was a commercial passenger jet, he deleted the post. The tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets countered that there had never been any such post, insisting that Ukraine’s own air defences had shot down the plane.

The Russian propaganda machine flooded the airwaves with misinformation about the disaster. Its actions go some way to explain why the international investigation into the tragedy took eight years to complete, as so much time and effort was expended exposing false narratives propagated by the Russian state.

The District Court of The Hague announced its verdict in the MH17 case on 17 November 2022, a full eight years and four months after the tragedy. The judges found that flight MH17 had been shot down by a Russian Buk missile and that the missile-launcher had been transported from Russia to the DPR-controlled village of Pervomaisk before being hastily returned to Russia. 

Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, the DPR’s military intelligence chief, and Leonid Kharchenko, a DPR intelligence unit commander, were convicted in absentia of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. The court concluded that the fourth defendant, Oleg Pulatov, a former Russian military officer, had also been involved in the crime, but was forced to acquit him due to lack of evidence.

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had been going on for almost five months by the time the court in the Schiphol Judicial Complex announced its verdict, a war the whole world now knows about, and which only Russia refuses to call by its name.

‘It’s like sandpaper is being rubbed over my skin’

Anton Kotte, who has just turned 80, is organising the ceremony being held on Wednesday at the MH17 National Monument in Park Vijfhuizen, next to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, where Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 took off for Kuala Lumpur 10 years ago.

More than 1,500 relatives and friends of the 298 victims are due to gather for the occasion, which will also be attended by members of the Dutch royal family, the prime minister and cabinet members. The culmination of the ceremony will be the reading out of the victims’ names followed by a minute of silence. Kotte has already been on site for five days straight, to ensure the anniversary ceremony goes off without a hitch.

When I visited him two years ago at his home in the Dutch city of Eindhoven, he showed me a child’s dark blue backpack with the name of his six-year-old grandson, Remco, written on it. Despite falling to Earth from a height of 10 kilometres, the backpack somehow managed to survive intact. Not only was the hand luggage tag still on it, Remco’s books, pens and pencils were still inside. He had been due to start school straight after the holidays.

Kotte lost his son, grandson and daughter-in-law in the tragedy. And then five years on, he lost his wife, who had never been able to come to terms with the tragedy. “We loved each other, but we had different ways of dealing with grief,” Kotte recalls. “She would always say: ‘It’s not natural for a mother to outlive her son’. Whereas I found myself wondering what I could do in their names. Everything I do, I do for them. I owe it to them, you know?”

When I ask whether his work for the MH17 Foundation, which was set up by the relatives of those killed in the tragedy, provides him with any relief, he says no. “It’s so unfair that I, at 70, was given another 10 years of life and three young people in their prime were deprived of theirs. It’s unfair.”

The Gilze-Rijen Air Base is a half-hour drive from his home. It now houses the reconstructed Boeing, the wreckage of which was transported from the sunflower fields of the Donetsk region where it landed and was painstakingly reassembled piece by piece. Kotte has visited the hangar many times along with other relatives of those claimed in the tragedy, most recently earlier this week, when he showed a group of visitors from Malaysia around.

Kotte says when relatives gird themselves to climb the stairs and enter the plane, the first thing they want to see is the seat where their loved one was sitting. “This reconstructed plane is a stand-in crash site for them, as they can’t visit the original site because of the war. They could die. And there’s no end in sight. So that plane seat is the closest connection between them and their dead relative.”

Kotte stresses that while he may be an MH17 Foundation board member, he is first and foremost a relative. He is sometimes overcome with emotion when he sees the plane in the hangar at the air base. “Then I need to stop for a few minutes and turn away,” he says quietly. “I lost three people, after all. At those moments, it’s like sandpaper is being rubbed over my skin.”

‘Among the lucky’

Silene Fredriksz will be one of the relatives reading out the names of the dead, which takes about half an hour. She has been reading the names out for several years, and although she finds it very difficult, she considers it the most important part of the annual ceremony that takes place in Park Vijfhuizen.

All that remains of her son Bryce is his severely burnt left foot, which was handed over to them from eastern Ukraine a few months after the disaster. Though it feels monstrous to say so given the circumstances, the Fredriksz family were among the “lucky” ones, and that is genuinely how she sees it too. 

I recall the case of Piet Ploeg. There was no trace of his brother Alex in the wreckage. “It’s like he never existed,” Piet says. Two years ago, he showed me a small plastic box with some soil and a piece of molten metal in it, and said with regret: “That’s all I have from there.”

Bryce was flying to Kuala Lumpur with his girlfriend Daisy. He was 23, she was 20. The Fredriksz family consider both their children.

The family has been actively involved in every event connected to the MH17 tragedy all these years. Along with her husband Rob and a small group of other relatives, every June Silene places 298 white chairs in front of the Russian Embassy in The Hague. They set them up in the same formation they would have had in the downed Boeing: an aisle of two chairs by each window with rows of five in between. Embassy staff have never once responded to the action in the 10 years since the relatives started doing it. 

Silene and Rob recently went to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to attend the ongoing case of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, in which the court is considering the countries’ joint complaint that following the occupation of Donbas, Russia systematically violated human rights or failed to investigate human rights violations committed there. The relatives expect the verdict early next year.

“We’ve had a bit of justice over the course of these 10 years,” Silene says. “Three people have been found guilty. But there are many more culprits — Russian servicemen whose names we still don’t know. Why did they fire? Why did they shoot down the plane? Didn’t they know it was a civilian aircraft? They should have! Who gave the order? Why? What were they thinking? So we still have a lot of questions. We want the whole truth, not just part of it.”

She believes the whole world needs to hear the answers to those questions, not only the relatives of those who perished. “The perpetrators are still at large. The world still hasn’t understood what a threat … Russia is, or rather … the authorities are … and Putin personally,” she says.

Asked whether now, after more than two years of full-scale war, she thinks the world finally understands, she replies, “I don’t. Because we still want to talk to them and are afraid to supply weapons to Ukraine. What are we waiting for? We have to help! If Europe had offered its full support right away, the war would be over. But it’s dragging on and on and on. The world finally needs to understand that the Kremlin has to be stopped. It all started in 2014, with Crimea, and nobody woke up and paid attention then. Nobody! And there’s been war all these years ever since.”

‘One day the boss will be gone’

Hans de Borst is in charge of reading out the names — the most emotional part of the ceremony. It has proven almost impossible to track him down in the days preceding the event, as it’s very important to him that everything goes smoothly. Shortly before we speak, he has received confirmation that the son of the Malaysian pilot will be at the ceremony with his brother and mother, the pilot’s widow, and will read out the names of the deceased crew members.

De Borst lost his only daughter, 17-year-old Elsemiek, in the crash. Ten years on, he still misses the small things acutely. When she used to visit, he would first hear her bike bell, and then the door slam shut. He is grateful that “she was still in one piece, unlike some others”. Her passport, complete with boarding pass tucked inside, and her grandmother’s ring, still on her finger, survived.

Elsemiek’s grandmother is still alive and turned 90 on 6 July, though she is in the early stages of dementia. While she is no longer well enough to attend the event in person, she will be watching it on TV. She recently asked De Borst: “Elsemiek wasn’t on that plane, was she?” He replied: “She was,” as he prefers not to lie to her. She then pointed at a photo of her granddaughter and said: “But here she is!” De Borst said that he calmly explained that it was just a photo, and that they hadn’t seen Elsemiek for 10 years. 

However, he too sometimes feels like it’s only been two weeks. “Sometimes I still can’t believe it happened at all. You find yourself wondering where your child is, why they’re not around. So it’s strange. A lot of people in Ukraine are going through the same thing right now,” he adds before wondering aloud: “Why did they kill my child? Because she was going on holiday? I’ll struggle to hold back tears during the minute of silence on Wednesday. When I see all these people standing there … who still have so many unanswered questions — unanswered because only Russia can answer them and Russia isn’t interested in the truth. It’s only interested in bombing children’s hospitals.”

While De Borst plans to spend the whole of Wednesday with friends and family, he says he plans to spend the following day alone. “It will be a beautiful ceremony, but it won’t bring my daughter back. So the day after, I don’t want to talk to anyone. I do that every 18 July. I just lie around at home, watching TV, or rather, not watching. I just have it on in the background. ... I don’t want to do anything that day. I just want to be left alone. After that, everything will be fine again, life will go on.”

De Borst plans to go to Paris for the opening of the Olympic Games later this month and has tickets for two events to ensure he’s “not sitting around crying all day long.” 

“But I’m still angry. Why did it happen? We’re still waiting for answers. One day the boss will be gone,” he says, referring to Putin.

‘Forgiven, but not forgotten’

When I get through to Robbert and Loes van Heijningen, it turns out they are on holiday. I apologise for interrupting, but Loes says: “It’s fine. MH17 always flies with us, wherever we are. Sometimes it flies high and we barely feel its presence. Sometimes it comes down low, and we can hear the hum. It always flies low in July.” Her husband, Robbert, adds that there’s currently no escaping MH17 at all: “The war between Russia and Ukraine reminds us of the tragedy every day.”

The Van Heijningen family lost three of its members that day: Robbert’s brother Erik, his wife, Tina, and their son, Zeger. They both find it hard to believe that 10 years have gone by. Their son Jasper helps to bring home the reality of it all. “I look at him and think he was 11 when the tragedy happened, and now he’s 21. He’s grown into a young man. While Erik’s son Zeger has remained a 17-year-old teenager. All the passengers are frozen in time, while our lives go on.”

Before the verdict in the case was announced in the autumn of 2022, Robbert had said to me: “We need to lay the blame on the Russian state and military, but not all Russians. I see now, at this time of war, that public opinion is sceptical when it comes to Russians living in Russia. I really hope that we — the relatives, society as a whole — can separate the two: the state from the people. I’m a little afraid we’ll stop seeing the difference.”

Two years later, he confirms that he is still of the same opinion. He says 10 years on, he and Loes have forgiven, but not forgotten. However, he warns me that most of the relatives feel disappointment and think justice has not been served. “We’ve noticed that more and more relatives are angry,” says Robbert. “They’ve increased in number over the past five years, especially after Russia attacked Ukraine. The number of people who think like us — that we should forgive, but not forget — is shrinking.”

‘We carry the sadness at Jack’s death in our bones’

I first met Jon O’Brien in November 2022, just after the District Court of The Hague had announced its verdict. He and his wife Meryn had flown over especially from Australia. Their 25-year-old son Jack was a passenger on flight MH17.

“We are extremely worried about what’s going on in Ukraine now,” Jon said, standing outside the Schiphol Judicial Complex, his voice trembling, every word clearly a struggle. “It’s because our son Jack was killed in this war. This war took his life. It was Russia’s aggression that killed him and all other people on that Boeing. And I want to see the Russian Federation in the dock in person.”

Speaking to him now, on the eve of the tragedy’s 10th anniversary, I hear many words of support for Russian journalists — whether in exile, or still in Russia — and for all Russians who are against the war. “I feel our family has, inadvertently, come to share a small part of the battle you have been fighting for many years, and we have also been grievously wounded,” he wrote.

He tells me that his son had travelled around Europe for several weeks in 2014, including to Russia, taking in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. In one picture he sent, Jack is in St. Petersburg on Palace Bridge, overlooking the River Neva, holding a map of the city with the Kunstkamera museum and the Academy of Sciences behind him. Jack was flying home on flight MH17. There were 27 Australian citizens on board.

The O’Brien family has chosen not to fly to the Netherlands for the anniversary, deciding instead to watch a live broadcast of the memorial ceremony at home in Sydney. However, Jon O’Brien has written an open letter to the Russian people to mark the occasion, which Novaya Gazeta Europe has published separately in full.