Before you is a reblog of an article by Alan Moore, published on August 6, 2025 in Open Magazine. We thank our subscribers at the Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden” for bringing this new evidence about the MH17 disaster. This article is also available in Spanish at a Telegraph blog.
Follow the tag MH-17 for all the past publications on this topic at our blog.
Fresh evidence surfaces in Malaysian MH17 crash that killed 298 people in 2014
Revelations by Oleg Pulatov, who was acquitted of all charges due to lack of evidence, raises new doubts about the Dutch investigation
Pulatov during the court hearing
When the Malaysian Airlines plane was shot down on July 17, 2014, I was in Voronezh, Russia. A week earlier I’d been in Europe and while sitting in my Viennese hotel watched various news channels reporting on the mess that was Donbass. It was personal for me. I’d been in Kiev in January 2014 and seen first-hand the nastier elements looking for reasons to be violent. Living in Voronezh I’d met refugees from Ukraine from April 2014 and by the time schools had started back on September 1, the initial trickle of human misery became a steady river. Yet MH17 terrified me, just the idea of flying and being shot down accidentally did affect my travel plans for a decade. It returned to my life when I was contacted by a man desperate to have his story heard.
Oleg Pulatov knew me as a sports journalist and one who was rather blunt about the scourge of corruption. From uncovering doping scandals to athlete abuse, match-fixing to financial funny business, he liked my work but was no fan of mine. Especially my “attack”, as he put it, on neo-Nazi elements within football fan groups in Ukraine in 2011 and 2012. Something I’d written about and cooperated with the BBC on exposing. The man, with family roots in the Donbass, didn’t take kindly to my blunt take on football hooligans and their nefarious activities, explaining that these were common criminals without ideology. Yet when he reached out last month about a potential story, there was a different vibe. He wanted to meet in person, something that made me wonder – why? And who is the man who’d criticised my writing in the past?
Who is Oleg Pulatov?
Born in Ulyanovsk (Russia), he was educated in Ukraine where his family come from. He was a military man his whole life, seeing combat in a number of theatres and was semi-retired when he objected to Kiev’s bombing of civilians in the Donbass. He joined the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) defence force, being elevated from Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel. In July 2014 he was Deputy Head of the DPR’s Intelligence Directorate’s Special Operations Department and commanded a group of forces on the Snezhnoye-Marinovka frontline.
Due to his rank and position, he answered for the area where the aircraft came down. He arrived on the scene of the tragedy and immediately set up a ‘sanitary zone’ around the crash site. Oleg was one of four men later charged by a Dutch court with shooting down the airliner and the only one acquitted in November 2022. His voice was silenced in the process, which is not only his point of view.
As one lawyer from Eindhoven told me over the phone: “Given what he had to say, he was acquitted in the hope that he’d shut his mouth.” Oleg wanted to speak at his trial, he went unheard, 11 years after the tragedy, he needed to tell everything.