From Rebecca Rommen at Business Insider:
...The Malaysia Airlines Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur flight was blown out of the skies by proxies loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2014, who had seized The Donbas region from Ukraine — today the fulcrum of some of the most bitter battles of Russia's 2022 invasion. Indeed, in February, prosecutors at The Hague said they had found "strong indications" that Putin had approved using the Russian BUK missile system to shoot down the plane.
At the same airbase on August 20, the Netherlands' Prime Minister Mark Rutte confirmed that the country will send up to 42 F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine following the US's announcement that it had approved the transfer, Reuters reported, in what was perhaps a symbolic nod to the 2014 tragedy.
"I think our government drew this connection really clearly. Because they hosted Zelenskyy at the same airfield where the bodies of these passengers of MH17 were brought when they were brought back to the Netherlands," Chris Colijn, a Ukraine expert at Dutch media company RTL Nederland, told Insider.
The wikipedia entry summarizes what happened in 2014:
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17(MH17/MAS17)[a] was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down by Russian-controlled forces[4][5][6][7] on 17 July 2014, while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed.[8] 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 from the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border.[9] The shoot-down occurred during the war in Donbas over territory controlled by Russian separatist forces.[10]
...On 17 November 2022, following a trial in absentia in the Netherlands, two Russians and a Ukrainian separatist were found guilty of murdering all 298 people on board flight MH17. The Dutch court also ruled that Russia was in control of the separatist forces fighting in eastern Ukraine at the time.[4]
An article by Timo S. Koster in Atlantic Council has the larger story behind the role of the Dutch in getting military aid to Ukraine.
With its recent decision to supply F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, the Netherlands once again showed its leadership on the critical European security issue of our time and went a step further than any nation has so far. Of the forty-two F-16s in the Dutch fleet, “part will be for the training, and the rest is for Ukraine,” Minister of Defense Kajsa Ollongrenexplained last week. This follows early Dutch support for sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in January.
The Netherlands is punching above its weight in terms of overall military aid to Ukraine, too. So far, it has pledged $2.7 billion, the fourth most of any European nation, according to the most recent data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The Netherlands is only surpassed in this amount in Europe by three countries several times its size by population: Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland.
Although not all contributions have been made public, it’s clear that the Netherlands is doing more than many other nations of its size, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte is clearly taking the lead in showing other nations the way on how to support Ukraine in its defense against the brutal onslaught of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The Atlantic Council article gives a picture of why the Dutch are being pro-active on Ukraine, including humanitarian aid, reconstruction, and protection of its cultural heritage in addition to sending military aid. Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte saw Russia’s land grabs in Ukraine early on as a problem for all of Europe, not just as a regional conflict. (The country’s constitution calls for supporting a rules-based international order.) The shootdown of MH17 gave the Netherlands 193* reasons to be concerned.
….whereas the international community largely chose to ignore the Russian attack on Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, the Dutch were drawn into the conflict through the disastrous downing of flight MH17 by a Russian missile above Ukraine on July 17, 2014. The Malaysia Airlines passenger jet en route from Amsterdam held 193 (of 238) Dutch passengers, all of whom perished. This, combined with incidents such as the attempt by the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) to hack into the Wi-Fi network of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague in 2018, brought about a turnaround in the Dutch perception of security in Europe. The Dutch have felt firsthand the threat Putin poses.
* The two articles disagree on the exact number of Dutch casualties.
Under Rutte, the Dutch are boosting their military spending to meet the suggested 2% of GDP target, and have been contributing valuable assets to NATO for some time. While Rutte, the longest-serving Prime Minister in Dutch history is planning to step down, the Dutch commitment to a larger investment in military spending appears likely to continue according to the article.
It’s easy to focus on the current conflict in Ukraine from events dating from the Russian invasion in February 2022, but as the Dutch well know, it goes back years earlier and is part of a larger pattern of Russian aggression under Putin, aggression not limited to Ukraine or overt military conflict.
Would there have been a 2022 invasion if Europe had reacted more strongly to the events of 2014? It’s one of those questions that need to be asked even if they can’t be answered.
UPDATE 5:25pm ET: Here’s a Reuters report on the F-16s from the Netherlands, plus other donors. These aircraft are slated for replacement by F-35s; they are around 40 years old.