MH17 Two years later

At 4:20pm local time on July 17, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot from the sky over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew members. Within hours, the world became aware of the general circumstances that led to the tragedy: a group of pro-

Russian separatists shot down the passenger plane with a Buk anti-aircraft missile. Two years later, we know that these facts still hold up. However, largely due to a wealth of openly accessible and verifiable information, these two years have also given us a tremendous amount of evidence confirming this general set of circumstances, including the identity of the weapon that was used to shoot down MH17 and the Russian anti-aircraft missile brigade that

supplied this weapon.

This report will serve as a survey of the information related to the downing of MH17 that is freely available for anyone with an internet connection to access, analyze, and verify, also known as open source information. This information can be found anywhere from a newspaper to the social media account of a Russian or Ukrainian serviceman. What this report will not provide is information obtained through confidential or “closed” sources, such as non-public intelligence reports or secret interviews with witnesses or human sources. With an event as controversial and significant as the downing of MH17, it is vital that, to the greatest extent possible, information tied to the case is accessible by the public, and verifiable.

Furthermore, in this report we have sought the opinions and assessments of subject matter experts regarding our analyses of open source information. Their analyses are presented throughout this report, providing an additional analytic perspective to the open source evidence.