Ten years on from MH17 West too soft on Putin, says Bath expert
20-year-old Ben Pocock from Bristol was among nearly 300 people killed when the Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down over Eastern Ukraine
The shooting down of passenger jet MH17 by a Russian missile 10 years ago today, is one of many examples of when the West has been too soft on Vladimir Putin, according to an expert in Russian politics from the University of Bath.
Exactly one decade ago the Malaysian Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was passing over Eastern Ukraine when it was hit by what is now known to have been a Russian Buk missile.
In September 2016 an international team of investigators concluded evidence showed the missile had been brought into Ukraine from Russia and was fired from a field controlled by Russian backed fighters.
All 283 people on board the flight were killed including 20-year-old Ben Pocock from Bristol, who was on his way to spend six months studying in Australia.
Four individuals including three with connections to Russian intelligence are wanted by Dutch prosecutors in connection with the tragedy, but the Russian state has always denied involvement in various ways.
Dr Stephen Hall, a lecturer in Russian in post-Soviet politics at the University of Bath said: "The first and perhaps most important thing is to express my condolences to the families...
"What we can take from this I think is the necessity perhaps of having airlines not flying through warzones, (but) what we can also take from this is it highlighted to what extent Russia is prepared to fustigate when it comes to messaging and narratives."
Led by President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has never accepted responsibility for what happened, instead suggesting multiple different ways someone, or something else could be to blame.
"They've claimed that the missile system was Ukrainian," Dr Hall said.
"They've claimed that there was a ghost fighter jet next to the airline that actually shot them down.
"They've claimed that the flight MH17 did not actually have a living person on there, that it was actually full of bodies and that therefore it was a Western fake news operation to denigrate Russia...
"This is what I mean by fustigation. There are other words for it but I am choosing to be slightly more diplomatic about this."
Since even before Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in early 2000, evidence has been presented which appears to link him with serious criminal activity, something Mr Putin has always denied.
For example, in 1999 several apartment buildings across Russia were blown up killing a total of 307 people.
Russian officials blamed terrorists from the separatist region of Chechnya, however this was thrown in serious doubt when local police arrested three men carrying ID cards identifying them as agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), planting suspected sacks of explosives in the basement of a block in Ryazan.
Russia's security services later claimed the whole thing was a training exercise despite the explosives being genuine, with Putin then using the real bombings as justification for the Second Chechen War.
Since Mr Putin's election as President many opponents have been either seriously hurt or killed in suspicious circumstances, including former Soviet spy turned MI6 agent Sergei Skripal who was poisoned with Novichok in 2018 and Mr Putin's most ardent critic Alexi Navalny, who collapsed and died while being held at a Russian prison inside the artic circle in February.
They are just two of many similar examples.
"It's quite clear that the West has been too soft on Putin," Dr Hall said.
"In terms of MH17, in terms of the war on Chechnya, there's always been that link to the idea that Putin is a killer as (US President) Joe Biden famously said and as Heidi Blake and various others have written about...in terms of the assassinations...
"So certainly there has been instances, let's say and I think to an extent Western governments chose to ignore those instances for want of a better phrase, in terms of maintaining a relationship which was built on the West's over-reliance on Russian oil and gas."
In 2019 two Russians and a Ukrainian man were sentenced in their absence to life in prison for their role in shooting down MH17.
They are former Russian intelligence agents Igor Girkin and Sergey Dubinsky and Leonid Kharchenko, a Ukrainian separatist leader.
All three are believed to be in Russia. The Kremlin called the ruling "scandalous" and has refused to extradite them.