A Dutch court has convicted three men and acquitted one for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014 that killed all 298 people on board.
Russians Igor Girkin and Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko "are found guilty" of murder and intentionally causing an aircraft to crash, while Russian Oleg Pulatov was not guilty, head judge Hendrik Steenhuis said.
MH17 was a passenger flight shot down over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew.
At the time, the area was the scene of fighting between pro-Russian separatist and Ukrainian forces, the precursor of this year's conflict.
Victims' representatives say the ruling will be an important milestone, though the suspects, all of whom face life sentences, remain fugitives.
They are all believed to be in Russia, which will not extradite them.
Moscow denies any involvement or responsibility for MH17's downing and in 2014 it also denied any presence in Ukraine.
Prosecutors say the suspects, three former Russian intelligence officers and a Ukrainian separatist military leader, helped arrange and transport a Russian army BUK missile system into Ukraine that was used to shoot down the plane.
They were charged with shooting down an airplane and with murder in a trial held under Dutch law.
Phone call intercepts that formed a key part of the evidence against the men suggested they believed they were targeting a Ukrainian fighter jet.
Three of the men were tried in absentia and the fourth pleaded not guilty via lawyers he hired to represent him. None attended the trial.
Victims of MH17, which had been en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, came from ten different countries. More than half were Dutch.
The investigation was led by the Netherlands, with participation from Ukraine, Malaysia, Australia and Belgium.
The suspects were Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, and Oleg Pulatov; and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.
