Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage of the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. It was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014, after the disappearance of Flight 370 on 8 March. The shoot-down occurred in the War in Donbass, during the Battle in Shakhtarsk Raion, in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels. The Ukrainian Air Force had suffered losses from increasingly sophisticated air defence weaponry. Immediately after contact with the aircraft was lost, the rebel militia in Donetsk claimed to have shot down a Ukrainian An-26 military transport airplane. When it became apparent that the wreckage that fell near Hrabove was from a civilian airliner, the separatists withdrew this claim and denied shooting down any aircraft.