Opinion | Was the Downing of Flight MH17 State-Sponsored Murder?

Subsequent findings by a Joint Investigation Team of prosecutors from Ukraine and four countries whose citizens perished in the disaster — the Netherlands, Malaysia, Belgium and Australia — and by private agencies like the online investigative site Bellingcat meticulously documented how a Russian missile launcher belonging to an active Russian military unit was driven into eastern Ukraine and used to fire a Buk missile at the Malaysian jumbo jet. At the time, Ukrainian separatists had been targeting government aircraft at altitudes only slightly lower than those used by commercial jetliners.

The charges announced Wednesday went beyond declaratory accusations and linked actual faces and crimes to the crash. The destruction of MH17 was not collateral damage in some nasty conflict, declared Fred Westerbeke, the chief prosecutor of the Netherlands, but murder committed by men acting on Moscow’s orders in a proxy war against Ukraine. And they will be tried in a Dutch court beginning on March 9, 2020 — Dutch, because 193 of the passengers were Dutch — whether they’re present or not.

The four men, for whom international arrest warrants were issued, have figured in previous reports, including intercepted telephone calls in which they discuss movements of the missile launcher and the actual missile firing. One, Igor Girkin, had been a colonel in Russia’s F.S.B. spy service; two, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, had served with the G.R.U. military intelligence agency; and the fourth, Leonid Kharchenko, was a Ukrainian who led a rebel combat group in Donetsk under the Russians.

The accused did not actually fire the missile, the investigators said, but they “formed a chain” linking the breakaway “Donetsk People’s Republic” directly with Russia. They were responsible for bringing the Russian missile system into eastern Ukraine, and so could be held criminally responsible for murdering 298 people.

And therefore so could Moscow. “We now have proof Russia was involved in this tragedy, this crime,” Mr. Westerbeke declared. “One day after 17 July they were in a position to tell us exactly what happened. They knew. The Buk was used in eastern Ukraine and they knew this. They didn’t give us this information.” Moscow, of course, denies it all, and will continue to act as a victim of Western intrigue, trusting that Western governments will make noise for a time and then go back to doing business with Russia.