Yana Yerlashova, “MH17 – Call for Justice” (Bonanza Media, July 2019)
Five years after the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 passenger jet was shot down in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board, the investigation led by the Netherlands, Ukraine, Australia and Belgium (and including Malaysia intermittently – the country was not included on the Joint Investigation Team for the first six months of the investigation) is no closer to coming to a definite conclusion, based on a definite chain of evidence, as to who actually bears the responsibility for shooting down the jet. Instead the JIT continues to adhere to a narrative, publicised almost as soon as the jet hit the ground, that supposedly Russian-backed separatists fighting the Ukrainian military brought the plane down with an SA-11 missile launched from a BUK missile delivery system. This documentary proceeds from the JIT’s public naming of four Donbass fighters as being responsible for ordering or leading the shoot-down, and global mass news media’s parroting of that announcement. The Bonanza Media team of investigative journalists, led by Yana Yerlashova and Max van der Werff, travel across the globe, from eastern Ukraine to Europe to Malaysia, to interview people including the current Malaysian Prime Minister Mohammed Mahathir, German aviation lawyer Elmar Giemulla, one of the accused Donbass fighters Sergey Dubinsky, members of the public in Kuala Lumpur, independent German journalist Billy Six, a friend of a passenger on the doomed jet, and local residents in the area where the plane went down, to get their views on the investigation and on what actually happened, and find that what actually happened on 17 July 2014 was very different from what the JIT claims and what the rest of the world believes.
While the documentary can be a bit confusing in the way it dashes from one aspect of the Bonanza Media team’s own investigation to another, and each aspect seems remotely related to the next, quite a few things become very clear. The team discovers that the Ukrainian security service SBU’s phone-taps of conversations Sergey Dubinsky had with his fighters were edited and tampered with after the journalists take tapes to IT forensic investigators in Malaysia for examination and analysis. One jaw-dropping fact is that five years after the incident, various parts of the jet can still be found in the countryside around where the plane fell. The journalists come across a large part of the wing in a field and watch it being transported to a Ukrainian woman who deposits it and various other pieces of wreckage into a large shed, promising to deliver the scraps to the Dutch. Villagers in Stepanovka, the area where MH17 tell of what they saw on the day: they say that military jets shadowed the passenger jet while a missile launched from a site held by Ukrainian forces (contrary to the official narrative) headed towards the jet. Along the way, videos that have been used by the JIT to support the official narrative are examined and found to have been spliced together in ways that belie the dates when they were originally made, to suggest that the Donbass fighters received support from Russia and fired the missile. Independent Dutch journalist Stefan Beck tells the Bonanza Media team that he interviewed a Ukrainian military air traffic controller who tells him that the Ukrainian government misinformed the JIT about three radar stations being switched off on the day of the crash (they had actually been switched on).
Many questions arise from this documentary: why was Ukraine allowed to join the JIT but not Malaysia? why did the JIT rely on Ukrainian SBU’s suspect phone-taps as evidence on which to indict Sergey Dubinsky and three other men? why did the JIT not do a thorough job in collecting all the evidence and why is the team uninterested in the evidence the Bonanza Media team and others have found? Why is eyewitness evidence being ignored? All these questions suggest that the investigation was prejudiced against Russia from the outset and remains prejudiced for geopolitical and strategic reasons.
Viewers may be surprised that the documentary is quite short, less than half an hour, and is rather rough around the edges, finishing very quickly and zipping through the end credits. Some aspects of the journalists’ own investigation are quite thorough in coverage and others not so much so. The documentary needs to be seen in conjunction with other online, printed and visual materials and information that query the JIT’s investigation and the conclusions it reaches, and the disgustingly shoddy way in which that team conducted its search and analysed the evidence collected.