The finding is hardly the first to debunk important elements of the Russian government’s narrative of who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard, in the worst atrocity of the war in Ukraine.

At the time, Russia’s state news agency, RIA, initially reported that Russian-backed separatists had shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft, but quickly backtracked once it became clear a civilian airliner had been brought down.

Russian state television devoted considerable airtime to conspiracy theories, including assertions that the Ukrainians were trying to shoot down President Vladimir V. Putin’s plane, that the plane had been filled with dead bodies and crashed in an elaborate ruse to embarrass Russia, or that the Central Intelligence Agency was behind the attack. Ukraine and Western governments say that none of this is true, and that active-duty Russian soldiers backing the rebels fired on the airliner, perhaps mistaking it for a military aircraft, as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.

The photographs were published on the websites of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense just days after the crash. They were presented as having been taken by one or more Russian spy satellites on July 17, 2014, as war raged in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian presentation asserted that “according to our information on the day of the accident the Ukrainian armed forces deployed three to four artillery battalions of Buk-M1 missiles, and provided two satellite images to support the claim.