Top Russian officer linked to MH17 plane crash

One of the men charged over the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has refused to deny taking orders from a senior Russian general, who has been named as a potential suspect.

Col Gen Andrei Burlaka, the deputy head of the Russian Federal Security Service’s border guards, is four rungs down from president Vladimir Putin himself in the FSB chain of command and would be the most senior Russian official implicated in the disaster to date.

According to an investigation published this week, Burlaka directed Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and was in charge of supplying them with weapons at the time the BUK missile launcher that downed the aircraft crossed the border.

The Kremlin has refused to comment on the allegations.

The men he directed would have included Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, who was the defence minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic and is being prosecuted in the Netherlands for the deaths of 298 people on the flight.

Asked by users on his Vkontakte social media page whether it was true that he answered to n Burlaka, Girkin wrote only that “the rebels did not shoot down the Boeing”.

He has previously admitted to knowing the man.

Bellingcat, an online investigation website, and The Insider, its Russian partner organisation, said this week that they had used telephone databases and facial and voice recognition technology to identify him as “Vladimir Ivanovich”, who the MH17 joint investigation team have asked for witnesses to help identify.

Intercepted recordings suggest he was a senior FSB official in charge of directing the separatist war effort against Ukraine. The trial of Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov and Leonid Kharchenko is expected to resume on June 8.