Conveyor of grief: what the relatives of people killed in the Boeing over Donbass were told at the trial

As Deutsche Welle writes, it looks like a conveyor belt of sorrow. One by one, gray-haired men and women in black enter the hall. They restrainedly talk about what they have wanted to shout about for seven years. The lawyer hands over his affidavits to the court, the presiding judge politely thanks, they leave.

About 90 relatives of the 298 victims tell the court how they survived the tragedy. Their performances will last for three weeks.

The first to perform were three brothers from Australia, who lost their parents in the disaster - Howard and Susan Horder. One, Matthew, spoke via video link, Mark spoke against the background of a photograph of his parents and a vase with sunflowers, which became a symbol of the tragedy - the wreckage of the plane and the body collapsed into the fields of sunflowers in the Donetsk region, controlled by the Ukrainian militias.

The brothers who received the floor told them what a shock it was when they learned about the disaster. “It's like a punch in the stomach”, - David, who was then living in London, described his feelings. All three recalled how the doctors diagnosed them with post-traumatic stress disorder, how antidepressants helped them to live on, how problems arose at work and in their personal lives. And only when the bodies of the parents were taken home and the sons scattered their ashes over the coast of Queensland, they managed to get out of the trance state. But the pain didn't go away.

A former banker from Amsterdam told how he barely survived the first time of the tragedy, when the remains of the bodies were collected for several months. His words about his deceased daughter help to understand how other relatives felt as well: "Her body was whole, but I was smashed to smithereens".

The investigation in the Netherlands believes that the Boeing was shot down by a Buk air defense system brought from Russia, and that the defendants played an important role in this. Former Minister of Defense of the unrecognized DPR Igor Girkin (Strelkov), head of the DPR Military Intelligence Service Sergei Dubinsky, field commander Oleg Pulatov and former commander of the intelligence unit of the DPR GRU, citizen of Ukraine Leonid Kharchenko are tried in absentia. However, according to Judge Frederick Steinhaus, the Russian authorities refused to help organize the face-to-face interrogation of the accused. Moscow explained this decision by the Criminal Procedure Code of Russia.

By the way, in May 2020, Strelkov gave an interview to the British newspaper The Times, in which he took moral responsibility for the death of the passengers of the downed plane. “Since I commanded the militia and was directly involved in that conflict, I feel a moral responsibility for these deaths”, - Strelkov said, adding, however, that the militia did not shoot down the plane.

Witness Matthew said that he would never forgive "Russia and those who are responsible for the death of his relatives". Adam chose neutral words, blaming "the actions of some people," outraged by the "misinformation of some governments".

Relatives of the victims, DW reported, in protest against Russia's behavior at the trial in The Hague, set up empty chairs in front of the Russian Embassy in the Netherlands.