This coming July 17 will mark the first anniversary of the shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. Flight 17, a Boeing 777 jet, was heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 298 passengers and crew from 10 countries. While most of the litigation regarding this disaster will likely proceed outside the United States, the disaster raises novel issues and also presents the first time since the 1999 Montreal Convention treaty came into force where an airline may attempt to limit the recoveries of the passengers' families to the arbitrary treaty limitation.

The Dutch Safety Board took charge of the crash investigation at the request of the Ukrainian government. The Dutch have a particular interest in determining the parties responsible for the shootdown because about two-thirds of the passengers were from the Netherlands. The Dutch Safety Board is working with representatives of other interested nations, including the Ukraine, Australia, the United States and Russia. Large portions of the plane wreckage have been shipped from the Ukraine to a facility in the Netherlands for analysis by the Safety Board.

The Safety Board has been cautious to state that it has not yet determined the cause of the disaster pending the conclusion of its investigation, expected later this year. Shortly after the disaster, however, the U.S. government declared that the plane was brought down by a surface-to-air missile fired from an area controlled by Ukrainian separatists and that Russia had recently supplied those separatists with anti-aircraft weapons and training.¹