UN rules Russia responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17
May 19, 2025
The council of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has deemed Russia responsible for downing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in July 2014, concluding that Russia’s use of surface-to-air missiles over eastern Ukraine violated Article 3 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation.
Notably, this case marks the first time in ICAO’s history that “its Council has made a determination on the merits of a dispute between Member States under the Organisation’s dispute settlement mechanism,” clarified ICAO. Although voted out and expelled from the Council in 2022, Russia was nevertheless part of ICAO at the time of the event.
Flight MH17 was headed from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur where it was shot down “amid the armed conflict between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian military forces,” explained the United Nations (UN). Individuals from 17 nationalities were among the 283 passengers and 15 crew members killed, including 196 Dutch citizens, 43 Malaysians and 38 Australian citizens or residents.
As such, the case was brought to ICAO by the Netherlands and Australia, with the former establishing a Joint Investigation Team a month after the crash (supported by Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine). This team determined that the flight had been shot down by a missile launched from a remote installation, transported from Russia to a farm field in eastern Ukraine. A Dutch court subsequently tried (in absence) and convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian for murder in 2022, while the UN also created what it termed “a special task force on risks to civil aviation arising from conflict zones” in the weeks following the crash.
With the ICAO council now concluding that claims brought by Australia and the Netherlands “were well founded in fact and in law” – notably, that the Russian Federation failed to uphold its obligation to “refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight” – a formal decision document will be issued at a future meeting.
In a statement, the Russian ministry of foreign affairs said that the claims are “at odds with reality”, stating it had submitted “exhaustive and convincing evidence and facts” prior to its withdrawal from the investigatory proceedings in June 2024. It also claimed that Kiev refused to close the airspace over the combat zone “and used civilian aircraft like Flight MH17 as a cover-up for its bombers”.
