NBC: Body Cam Footage Shows Paul Pelosi Opened Door For Police Before Alleged Attack
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | November 19, 2022
The official narrative on the Paul Pelosi attack purported by Democrats and the mainstream media makes zero sense. You don’t have to be a “conspiracy theorist” to recognize there were multiple contradictory accounts from the Department of Justice vs. local police and even some reports from journalists.
In fact, NBC suspended one of its own correspondents, Miguel Almaguer, after he reported that on the night of the supposed attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco that Paul Pelosi actually opened the door when police knocked, seemingly in normal health, and then walked away from the officers to talk to the alleged assailant David Depape, when Depape attacked him. This report led many to suggest that Pelosi and Depape somehow knew each other.
A media firestorm ensued along with denials from the DOJ, which detailed a completely different version of events in which the police officers opened the door themselves and found Pelosi struggling with Depape who had injured him with a hammer. NBC dropped Almaguer after many called his report “bizarre.”
As it turns out, Miguel Almaguer was right. NBC now reports that police body cam footage has been made available to some media outlets and the footage clearly shows Paul Pelosi opening the door for police in seemingly perfect health. This contradicts the DOJ report on the attack and suggests a potential cover-up.
NBC is forced to retract their earlier assertions that the Paul Pelosi open door event was unfounded. Why? Because they have to. Eventually the police body cam footage will make it out into the public sphere for everyone to see, and NBC is front-running their own false reports. However, they do suggest that “it doesn’t really matter” who opened the door to the Pelosi home, and that Paul Pelosi’s actions don’t support the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the attack.
If that is the case, then why would the DOJ lie? Surely, they have seen the same body cam footage. If there is no conspiracy, then why is there an attempted coverup?
NBC has never had a problem editorializing news stories in the past and presenting biased opinions as evidence, yet suddenly now they pretend as if they have journalistic integrity? It is incumbent upon journalists to present what they think are the facts to the general public, but they are also required to investigate potential false accounts and false information in order to separate truth from lies. In the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, NBC and other outlets clearly do not want to dig deeper.
Now that the midterm elections are over it would appear that the “MAGA attacker” story no longer serves any purpose. The Democrats conjured their own conspiracy theory first – The claim that right-wing “extremists” are a threat to “democracy” and that the Pelosi attack proves it. There is no evidence to support this claim. There is, though, evidence to support the theory that Pelosi was familiar with Depape and his behavior indicates familiarity.
No person under threat of being beaten with a hammer by a home intruder is going to move closer to the violent stranger instead of running towards the police. This does not happen, it’s nonsense.
What is likely to take place as this case develops? A media blackout on the story, much like we have witnessed with multiple cases in the past few years that make the political left look bad (the Waukesha massacre by BLM suppporter Darrell Brooks comes to mind). Details will probably emerge which further contradict the official narrative but they will be buried and ignored. The leftists will continue to label any suspicions as “conspiracy” as they hope and pray the general public completely forgets and moves on to other distractions.
NATO’s Frankenstein Monster… Kiev Regime Exposed in Criminal False-Flag Attack on Poland
Strategic Culture Foundation | November 18, 2022
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has been caught telling bare-faced lies about a missile strike on Poland this week. Even the United States and NATO backers of the Kiev regime have repudiated initial claims blaming Russia. The missile came from the Ukrainian military as NATO acknowledges, yet Zelensky continued to assert that it wasn’t from his forces. It is clear that the deadly attack was a deliberate provocation by the Kiev regime to escalate the war into an all-out NATO-Russia conflict, even if that meant World War Three.
The Kiev regime’s proclivity for staging provocations is well documented, albeit assiduously covered up by the Western media. Further cover-up is bursting at the seams owing to the manic and utterly criminal conduct of the Neo-Nazi regime.
In nearly nine months of this conflict, which began on February 24 when Moscow launched its special military operation to end non-stop deadly provocations against ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, the NATO-backed Kiev regime has engaged in countless other criminal provocations. Those provocations include carrying out massacres like the one at Bucha at the end of March, shelling the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, and plotting to detonate a dirty nuclear bomb. As our weekly editorial on October 28 headlined: “Dirty Nuke Bomb Fits Kiev Regime’s Record of Foul Tricks and Corruption”.
The Kiev regime was born out of a dirty trick. The Maidan Square sniper massacres in February 2014 against Ukrainian civilians and police officers culminated in a coup d’état.
It was fitting too that this week saw a Dutch court blaming Russia for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in 2014. The real culprits for the crime – in which 298 people onboard were blown out of the sky – were the Kiev regime forces who tried to blame it on Russia-backed Donbass separatists.
All such dirty tricks are purposed to criminalize Russia for “atrocities” and to escalate the war by invoking even more military support from the United States and its NATO partners. The Western states and their pliant corporate media have totally indulged in this propaganda to demonize Russia, if not at times author it.
This week, when the missile hit the village of Przewodow in the Lublin region of eastern Poland – killing two civilians – on November 15, the Kiev regime immediately blamed Russia. The comic-actor-turned-president Zelensky said it was an “act of terrorism” and an attack on NATO, thus justifying the bloc’s collective defense clause. His foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba clamored for NATO to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine and to supply F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.
The hysterical claims, much like the missile itself, completely overshot credibility. There were no Russian air strikes anywhere near the Ukraine-Poland border area at the time. Video footage of munition fragments also quickly indicated that it was an S-300 air-defense missile that was fired by the Kiev regime’s forces.
Remarkably, however, Zelensky’s incendiary claims were promptly rebutted by U.S. President Joe Biden, the Pentagon and other NATO leaders. They firmly said the missile that struck Poland was not a Russian weapon but rather it came from a Ukrainian air-defense battery which, it was claimed, missed its target, accidentally landing on Polish soil.
But even that benign account does not hold water. For a start, the Russian military was not targeting the area with their precision-guided missiles. There were no incoming Russian rockets whatsoever. So what was the Ukrainian S-300 aiming at? The fact that the S-300 was fired westwards toward Poland shows that the act was a deliberate one to hit the neighboring country and a member of NATO.
The rapid rejection of the Kiev regime’s claims by the United States and other NATO powers not only exposes Zelensky and his cabal as liars. It also inadvertently exposes them as criminal provocateurs who are willing to kill civilians for propaganda and political expedience.
Are Washington and its European vassals perhaps beginning to realize that they have created a Frankenstein monster in Kiev whose criminality and corruption know no bounds? The United States and its imperial minions certainly want to undermine and subjugate Russia in a grand scheme of geopolitical control, but even the arrogant would-be hegemon must realize that World War Three is an insane no-win prospect. The Kiev regime has milked the U.S. and the European Union for all their worth and created a fabulous money racket for the NATO military-industrial complex. But this regime’s desperation and its reckless attempts to incite World War Three appear to have become too much even for its Western patrons.
It seems significant that lately, Washington appears to be coaxing the Kiev regime to enter into a peace process with Russia. The U.S. top military commander, General Mark Milley, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has urged Kiev to “seize an opportunity for peace”.
Separately, astute independent American military analysts, such as Scott Ritter and Douglas Macgregor, have pointed out that Russia has the decisive upper hand in the conflict. As the war drags on over winter and beyond, the real danger is that the NATO and transatlantic alliance will collapse from the stresses and strains ensuing from devastating economic repercussions. That is why the United States and NATO leaders appear to be feeling the pressure to extricate from the war, or at least to tamp it down.
It was notable that the Kiev regime angrily lashed out at any suggestions of opening a peace dialogue with Moscow.
This would explain why the Zelensky cabal decided to raise the stakes by firing a missile at Poland. The selected target of Przewodow village would have been a tacit concession to limit the casualties, although making the deliberately murderous act no less despicable or unconscionable.
The trouble is the cabal has become so corrupt and wanton that it didn’t sufficiently think through its obvious criminal plan. The missile strike ended up backfiring spectacularly to blow up the regime’s criminality.
The question is: what will the NATO sponsors do about their Neo-Nazi construct in Kiev? The regime is patently out of control and liability for the Western powers. They know they can’t win a conventional war against Russia never mind a nuclear conflagration. So, will we see Zelensky and his cronies being taken out, in one way or another, having become too problematic for their foreign masters?
History shows that the Western powers have used Nazis and fascists in the past as their proxies against the Soviet Union and other adversaries, only for these powers to eventually be compelled to liquidate their proxies when their usefulness expires or becomes overbearing.
The Covid/Crypto Connection: The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Browstone Institute | November 18, 2022
A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.
As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.
This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?
Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.
Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.
Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”
For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.
It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”
I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:
The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.
In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.
Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”
Truly it gets worse:
FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.
Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on hold.
And worse:
The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”
More:
Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.
I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”
It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady, Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas April 2022
And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.

I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.
Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less compete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.
The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.
This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.
All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of “effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.
Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.
The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.
So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.
Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.
Republican US Congressman: Days of Endless Cash, Military Aid for Ukraine ‘Numbered’
Samizdat – 17.11.2022
WASHINGTON – US Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said the days of endless financial and security aid for Ukraine are numbered after the Republicans won a majority in the lower chamber of Congress.
“I’m here as a member of the House Armed Services Committee to say that the days of endless cash and military materiel to Ukraine are numbered,” Gaetz said on Thursday. “They’re numbered in the days that are required to act on Congresswoman [Marjorie Taylor] Greene’s well thought out resolution of inquiry and they are numbered when we get into the majority.”
Gaetz vowed not to vote for one more dollar or one more piece of military equipment for Ukraine. The congressman from Florida said the United States is far too entangled in the Ukraine conflict and has effectively extended it.
Gaetz also called on the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to declassify the Inspector General’s report on compliance with the existing regulations regarding the chain of custody of material going to Ukraine.
On Thursday, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said she is introducing legislation alongside other US House Republicans to audit funding provided to Ukraine. “We’re asking for everything to do with military, civilian and financial aid. We want it all,” she remarked at a conference.
Aside from Greene and Gaetz, House Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT) have co-signed the move to undertake audits of funds appropriated by Congress.
Green has stated that if the resolution is struck down, she intends to reintroduce the measure in the new year once the new Congress is brought in. “For next year, absolutely I’ll introduce this resolution again, but I’ll also be calling for a full audit. That’s what we want, we want to audit Ukraine,” she said.
How are FTX crypto exchange, DNC corruption and ’Ukraine aid’ connected

By Drago Bosnic | November 18, 2022
On October 11, FTX Group, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in the United States. The company’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried resigned, leading to a mind-blowing collapse of one of the top entities in the cryptocurrency industry. The company said that Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, “will remain to assist in an orderly transition.” John J. Ray III, the lawyer who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, took his place. The fall of FTX sent shockwaves throughout the cryptocurrency market, as many became wary that a similar crash could happen to other companies in the industry. However, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, it became clear that there is an unexpected connection between FTX, the Democratic Party and the so-called “Ukraine aid, fueling speculation as to what might have caused the crash.
According to a report by The Epoch Times, back in March, the Kiev regime established a crypto donations website, allowing it to convert cryptocurrencies into fiat money that would then be deposited at the National Bank of Ukraine. The goal was to raise $200 million, of which $60 million was collected by October. The money was to be used to procure assets for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, including digital rifle scopes, medical supplies, field rations, fuel, military clothing, etc. The initiative, called “Aid for Ukraine,” gained the support of FTX, staking outfit Everstake, and the local Kuna exchange. It also has the direct support of the Kiev regime’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.
“At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By setting up payment rails and facilitating the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the Central Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most,” Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement in March. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey [Vasylchuk] and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict,” the former FTX CEO concluded.
The move seems to have become a perfect opportunity for the corrupt officials in both Washington DC and the Kiev regime to funnel much of the “Ukraine aid” funds back to the US. While it’s not entirely clear if reports that the Neo-Nazi junta officials ‘invested’ in FTX are accurate, there are credible issues regarding the possibility that the Kiev regime was using the funds donated through FTX to funnel money back to the DNC coffers. The fact that Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest Democratic Party donor in 2021-2022, donating nearly $40 million, makes this possibility even likelier.
The Epoch Times report further states that in the first half of 2022, the former FTX CEO donated $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried made multiple visits to the White House, where he met with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the visitors log. On May 13, he also met with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff. Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under former US President Barack Obama, also attended some of the meetings.
The connections between FTX, the Kiev regime and the DNC are quite clear and raise a lot of questions. Billionaire Elon Musk was also puzzled by the revelation. As one Twitter user aksed whether FTX was being used to launder money for the Democratic Party, Musk replied it was “a question worth asking.” On November 14, Alex Bornyakov, the Kiev regime’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, dismissed the claims, although he failed to explain how exactly they were a “false narrative”.
“A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March,” Bornyakov tweeted. “Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.”
However, Fox News political commentator Jesse Watters thinks the evidence, although not conclusive at the moment, cannot be ignored and that the DNC’s motives to send billions of dollars to the Kiev regime are not so altruistic after all.
“Democrats send money to Ukraine, Ukraine sends money to FTX, and FTX sends money to the Democrat’s campaigns. I don’t know if this is war profiteering or money laundering, I don’t even know, but it needs to be investigated.” Watters said.
Although cryptocurrency experts agree that the scheme most likely wasn’t the primary reason for the downfall of FTX, the consequences of the scandal cannot be ignored and will most likely cause further issues on cryptocurrency markets. It’s also yet another indicator of how corruption is hidden behind the “aid for Ukraine” narrative.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Moscow Slams Dutch Court’s Politically-Motivated Verdict in MH17 Trial
Samizdat – 17.11.2022
The Russian Foreign Ministry has criticized The Hague District Court’s verdict in the MH17 case, stressing that the course and results of the trial in the Netherlands show that the proceedings were based on a political order to reinforce the version about Russia’s alleged involvement in the downing of the Malaysian plane.
Moscow expressed regret that the court in The Hague neglected the principles of impartial justice for the sake of political expediency and ignored the fact that all the conclusions of the prosecution are built upon anonymous testimonies.
The ministry pointed out that the court wasn’t even perturbed by the fact that the Ukrainian side refused to provide radar data or recordings of communication between air traffic controllers and the plane crew. The Dutch court also ignored documents that were declassified by the Russian Defense Ministry in 2018 concerning the missile, whose debris was found at the crash site.
The MoD declassified documents showing that the serial number found on debris from the Buk missile was cross-referenced with a log book, showing it was produced in 1986. The missile was then delivered to a military unit in Ukrainian SSR and had since not left Ukraine.
At the time, the ministry also stated that some of the videos provided to investigators showing the Buk system being transported from Russia to Donbass were manipulated.
Earlier on Thursday, The Hague District Court found three out of the four defendants in the case guilty. Two Russians, Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky, as well as Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko were given a life sentence in absentia, while Oleg Pulatov was acquitted.
The trio was ordered to pay compensation to the relatives of the 298 victims of the plane crash.
What Happened to Flight MH17?
Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was downed over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 as the region was mired in a conflict with the new government following a coup earlier that year. As a result, all 298 passengers – mostly Dutch – and crew on board were killed in the crash.
Following the tragedy, Kiev and the then-self-proclaimed republics in the Donbass region blamed each other for the downing, with the latter contending that they had no military equipment that would allow them to shoot down an aircraft at that altitude. The United States and a number of European nations, for their part, rushed to allege that Russia was responsible for the incident – a claim that was made even before an official investigation was launched.
Shortly thereafter, the Netherlands set up a Joint Investigative Team (JIT) to probe the MH17 case, but left Russia out of the process despite the latter’s consistent offers to assist in the investigation.
The JIT’s probe concluded that the aircraft was downed by a Buk missile, allegedly launched from a Russian anti-aircraft missile brigade ordinarily stationed in the city of Kursk, not far from the Ukrainian border. At the same time, the Dutch-led team refused to share concrete evidence to corroborate the claims that Russia was responsible for the downing.
In 2019, JIT announced that international arrest warrants would be issued for four suspects, Russians Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, on charges of murder, with a trial over the MH17 case beginning in the Netherlands in March 2020.
Moscow has repeatedly slammed JIT’s conclusions as “openly biased” and “one-sided” and emphasized that after being denied access to the formal probe, Russia had carried out its own investigation, which concluded that it was an older version of the missile made in 1986 and belonging to Ukraine that downed the ill-fated plane. Dutch investigators, however, ignored the information.
Dutch court passes sentence in MH17 trial
RT | November 17, 2022
The Hague District Court has found three people guilty in the high-profile case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, which was downed amid hostilities in the east of Ukraine in 2014. Russia criticized the Dutch-led investigation and prosecution as not fully objective.
One of the men accused was acquitted due to lack of evidence, but three were sentenced to life in prison, in partly due to their “detestable” attitude towards the trial, Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said. All four were tried in absentia.
The prosecutors had made a compelling case proving that the four defendants were involved in the downing of the aircraft, the court announced during proceedings at the Schiphol Judicial Complex (JCS) in the Dutch town of Badhoevedorp. The trial started in March 2020, with charges of murder and destruction of a civilian aircraft leveled against the defendants.
The court said it didn’t believe that the accused individuals had intended to shoot down a civilian aircraft, believing instead that they were firing at a military target, but that their actions were criminal nevertheless. Steenhuis noted that it was impossible to tell who actually gave the order to fire the missile.
The judge also said the three men found guilty will be liable for more than 16 million euros in compensatory damages to the victims’ families. This would be regulated by Ukrainian rather than Dutch law, except for the provision excluding same-sex partners from eligibility, he added.
The Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down as it flew over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. All 298 people on board were killed. The incident took place at a time when Ukrainian government forces were engaged in fierce battles against rebels who opposed the outcome of an armed coup in Kiev.
Two of the regions in eastern Ukraine eventually declared independence and formed the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, which, together with two other former Ukrainian regions, ended up being accepted into Russia after referendums earlier this year. The two nations are currently engaged in large-scale hostilities.
The four defendants in the trial were Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky, and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, all of whom held leadership positions in the anti-Kiev militias. All four denied the allegations against them and were tried in absentia. Prosecutors requested life sentences for the defendants. Pulatov was the only person on trial who chose to be represented by a lawyer. He was found not guilty.
The Dutch case relied to a certain degree on materials provided by Ukraine’s security service, the SBU. The court acknowledged that the source of the evidence was not impartial, but said it found no proof of any tampering.
Kiev and its Western backers blamed the shooting down of MH17 on Russia, claiming that it provided air defense systems to the rebels, who mistook the civilian airliner for a Ukrainian military aircraft and fired from a Buk launcher at it.
Moscow said Ukraine possessed the same type of weapon system and could have fired at the Boeing airliner. It also stated that the probe neglected to include evidence that contradicted prosecutors’ claims and should have also taken into account Ukraine’s failure to provide raw radar data from the day of the tragedy. Kiev claimed the information was not available.
Alamaz Antey, the Russian producer of the Buk system, released its analysis of the incident. It concluded that the missile that downed flight MH17 likely came from a position held by Ukrainian troops and couldn’t have been fired from the rebel-held territory that was pinpointed by investigators. The company, which carried out a range of experiments in 2015, maintained that the plane was shot down by an older version of the Buk missile, which wasn’t used by Russia but remained in service in the Ukrainian military.
The court ruled that the assessment by Almaz Antey was not verifiable and thus not admissible. The company is owned by Russia and thus its opinion may not be reliable, the court believes. It stated that it had investigated alternative scenarios of the events on its own and found them implausible.
The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that serial numbers found on fragments of the missile found at the scene identified it as coming from Ukraine’s stockpile.

