Four Charged With Shooting Down Flight MH17

The Boeing aircraft crashed in July 2014 (Picture: Darren Koch).

Three Russians and one Ukrainian have been charged with murder in the Netherlands over the downing of flight MH17 in July 2014, in which 298 people died.

Dutch National Police chief Wilbert Paulissen identified Russians Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, along with Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko, as suspects in the downing of the plane in Ukrainian air space, and announced that their trial would start in March 2020.

The three Russian men all have experience of serving in the military.

The international team investigating the downing of the flight will not ask Russia and Ukraine to extradite the four suspects.

Watch: The moment investigators revealed the identities of the four suspects earlier on Wednesday.

"In the short term we will ask Russia to hand the summons to the suspects who are in the Russian Federation," Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said.

All passengers and crew on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed on July 17 2014, when a missile shattered the Boeing 777 in midair sending debris and bodies raining down onto farms and fields of sunflowers.

The Joint Investigation Team have spent years gathering data including social media conversations and images, and recordings of intercepted phone calls, to present enough information to bring the murder charges forward.

Prosecutors say while it may not have been the men charged who pressed the button that fired the missile, they believe they were instrumental in bringing the hardware into eastern Ukraine.

Watch: A Dutch Satefy Board video from 2015 with reconstructions explaining how investigators believe the crash happened.

The international investigation team looking into the plane crash has blamed it on a Russian missile that was shot from separatist-held territory.

Girkin, a Russian national, was a military chief of the Russia-backed rebels in the area at the time and was named by the investigators as one of the key suspects.

Russia's foreign ministry has dismissed the charges against Russian nationals as "absolutely unfounded" and criticised investigators for using "dubious sources of information" and ignoring the evidence provided by Moscow in order to "discredit the Russian Federation".

It noted that the international team turned a blind eye to Ukraine's failure to close its airspace to commercial flights despite the fighting in the east.

The ministry said despite the investigators' "bias", Russia will cooperate with the probe to "help determine the truth".