Just over two years ago, in the middle of one of the hottest summers in recent memory, the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 changed the direction of the war in Ukraine. The European political class, though horrified by Russia’s bold and unrepentant aggression, was up to that point eager to avoid direct confrontation with the Kremlin, and was hoping that Russian President Vladimir Putin might somehow be cajoled into making peace. The downing of the civilian airliner, which killed all 298 passengers aboard, most of them Dutch, stiffened spines in Brussels, and broad sanctions followed.
At the start of 2014, mass protests against Ukraine’s corrupt President Victor Yanukovych had forced him to flee the country. The Maidan Revolution, as the protests came to be known, sent a clear message to Yanukovych’s backer, Russian President Vladimir Putin: Ukraine’s future would be with Europe, not with Russia. Putin did not take the news well. Seeing Ukraine slip away from Russia’s sphere of influence, as several former Soviet republics had already done, prompted him to move quickly. By March, Russian forces had taken over the Crimean peninsula and installed a quisling government. At the same time, uniformed Russian-speaking military forces without insignia – dubbed “little green men” during the Crimean operation – and civilian separatist paramilitaries started agitating in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. By summer, what initially were skirmishes and violent protests had metastasized into a full-blown war, fueled by Russian weapons, troops, and military intelligence and leadership. Ukraine lost large swaths of eastern territory in Luhansk and Donetsk as Russian-backed forces sought to establish independent “republics” in those regions. The downing of MH17 didn’t immediately blunt Russia’s momentum on the ground, but it changed the political dynamics.
