Outside the courthouse there was a smell of kerosene and the roar of airplanes could be heard every few minutes.

The Schiphol Justice Complex, one of three high-security courts in the Netherlands, is located directly on a runway at Schiphol Airport.

Here, in a suburb of Amsterdam, the criminal case for the crash of flight MH17 began two and a half years ago.

The Boeing 777 serving Malaysian Airlines took off here on July 17, 2014 – and never reached Kuala Lumpur.

Two hours and 49 minutes after takeoff, it suddenly disappeared from the radar screens of Ukrainian air traffic control.

Shortly thereafter, debris fell over a wide area in Donetsk Oblast, which was then controlled by separatists.

298 people from 17 countries were dead, most of them Dutch, including four Germans.

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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It was a national trauma in the Netherlands, but also the start of an international investigation, a Joint Investigation Team with professionals from the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia and Belgium - the four countries from which most of the victims came - as well as Ukraine, where the plane crashed.

And it was the beginning of a struggle for the truth that came to a temporary end on Thursday.

Three of the four accused were sentenced to life imprisonment by the District Court of The Hague for causing a plane crash resulting in death and murder.

Life imprisonment in the Netherlands means an indefinite sentence.

However, it is not to be expected that they will be held accountable for this in the foreseeable future.

The two Russians Igor Girkin, 51 years old, and Sergej Dubinskij, 60,

and the Ukrainian Leonid Chartschenko, 50, are not available to either the Dutch or the Ukrainian judiciary.

Girkin, the best-known of the quartet for his all-encompassing Twitter presence, is said to be back fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Chartschenko could also be there.

"No right to shoot down a plane"

In July 2014, the four men were part of a chain of command, which is why they were charged in 2019.

Girkin was "Minister of Defense" of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic", Dubinsky was his deputy and head of the secret service.

Pulatov, in turn, was his deputy, and Chartschenko commanded a separatist unit.

According to the court, these four procured a Buk-M1 anti-missile defense system in Russia and deployed it in a field near the village of Pervomaiskyj, just below the flight path of MH17.

However, they did not trigger the deadly missile.

Whether they gave the order to do so is uncertain.

However, according to the court, this did not preclude criminal liability.

As the presiding judge Hendrik Steenhuis explained, the three convicts were accomplices responsible for the shooting down and the deaths of the passengers.

The fact that they themselves wanted to shoot down a Ukrainian military aircraft, as evidenced by wiretapped conversations, does not change that.

After all, according to the international law of war, the separatists were not combatants who could have invoked immunity.

"You had no right to shoot down an airplane, even a military one," Steenhuis stated.