The onus was on the Ukrainian authorities to take measures to prevent Boeing MH17 crush

It shows a degree of poor sight from a civil aviation perspective, but disturbingly, the refusal on the part of Ukrainian authorities to heed concerns that the airspace in the eastern part of the country should have been closed to civilian aircraft prior to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 last year was always a telling point.

The release of the Dutch Safety Board report at the overwhelming sense here was that such commercial airliners should not have been flying over eastern Ukraine at the time. Even at the time MH17 was shot down, publications such as Der Spiegel noted how crowded that particularly route was. According to Joustra, there were 32 countries still sending their airliners through the airspace. “MH17 was one of the 160 flights that operated there.”
The Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, also cited by the Dutch Safety Board report, makes it clear that responsibility for aviation safety is the preserve of the sovereign state in question.

Ukrainian aviation authorities were certainly not going to restrict commercial flights, which provide overflight fees exacted similar to road tolls. The cash incentive, one made more pronounced by Ukraine’s poor finances, tended to take precedence over airline safety.
The onus was on the Ukrainian authorities to take measures that simply never eventuated. Instead of acknowledging that aspect of the report, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko did what sides in this conflict have done from the start: politicise tragedy.

For Poroshenko, the downing of MH17 never had anything to do with the insufficiency of Kiev’s warnings or concerns over a conflict zone – it was an act of presumed Russian criminality. Any contrary assertion has been dismissed.