On Wednesday, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the tragedy that took 298 lives, relatives of passengers lost when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine gathered with officials at Australia’s Parliament House.
Paul Guard, one of those relatives, primarily attributes the missile attack that murdered 38 Australian nationals and permanent residents, including his parents, Toowoomba doctors Roger and Jill Guard, to the turmoil that was raging in eastern Ukraine ten years ago.
“I don’t think anyone intended to bring down a passenger plane. So in that sense, I’m heartbroken that the conflict continues,” Paul Guard stated.
“But I think that a lot of families would really have just liked an acknowledgement that what happened was wrong and that Russia should not have been waging war,” the son continued.
Since then, the situation has worsened, and in February 2022, Russia invaded its smaller neighbor, sparking a full-scale battle.
The fields where much of the debris landed after the Boeing 777 broke apart and the pro-Russia rebel-held border region where a Soviet-era Buk surface-to-air missile was fatefully deployed are now under Russian military control.
Moscow has consistently denied being the cause of the downing of MH17 and has declined to turn over two Russians and a Ukrainian who were found guilty of murder in absentia by a Dutch court in 2022.
Russia is still being investigated under international law for its suspected role in downing MH17 by the Netherlands in the European Court of Human Rights and by Australia and the Netherlands together through the International Civil Aviation Organization Council, or ICAO.
Penny Wong, Australia’s foreign minister, expressed her “appalled” reaction to Russia’s withdrawal from the ICAO proceedings on Wednesday.
Wong informed the international diplomats gathered that “the case will continue and we will not be deterred in our commitment to hold Russia to account.”
“Today, on behalf of the Australian government, I recommit again to our collective pursuit of truth, justice and accountability for the outrages perpetrated on 17th July, 2014,” she continued.
When MH17 was shot down, Tony Abbott was the prime minister of Australia. Abbott remembered on Wednesday that in 2014, during an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit in Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin reacted physically aggressively when the Australian brought up the issues of MH17 and the Ukraine crisis.
According to Abbott, Putin claimed via an interpreter that all Ukrainians were fascists, that they had brought down MH17, and that Ukraine had no right to exist.
“Then as we were going back into the conference — and this was really quite an extraordinary thing — he suddenly turned, grabbed the elbows and tried to shake me and then pushed me away. And he said in English, where he’s quite fluent: ‘Look, you are not a native Australian but I am a native Russian,’ and pushed me away,” Abbott stated.
“I think what he was trying to say to me in his own rather blunt and brutal way was that how could I as a citizen of a settler society understand the blood and soil and mystical attachment that he had to every last inch of Mother Russia?” Abbott stated.
“So it was pretty obvious to me right back then what he was on about. I just think it’s a pity that more wasn’t done to arm up the Ukrainians in the meantime,” Abbott continued.
