Russian President Vladimir Putin likely signed off on supplying Moscow-backed separatists with the missile system that downed a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane over Ukraine in 2014, a European investigative team said Wednesday, potentially implicating the Russian leader in a crash that killed 298 people.
But a joint investigation team at The Hague said it could not prove conclusively that Putin was behind the Buk missile strike on a doomed Boeing 777, and did not announce new prosecutions in a case that already produced convictions of three leaders of a separatist military force in Ukraine.
“The bar for establishing individual criminal liability is high,” Digna van Boetzelaer, a Dutch prosecutor who led the investigation, said in a statement. “At the moment we do not meet that bar.”
