(CNN) Four people will be charged with murder and causing the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, five years after the plane was shot down in eastern Ukraine killing 298 people, international investigators said Wednesday.

The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) said it would issue national and international arrest warrants for the four suspects. Three Russians, Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy and Oleg Pulatov, were named, along with Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko.

The flight was on its way from Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in July 2014, when it was shot out of the sky over territory held by pro-Russian separatists.

According to investigators, Girkin is a former colonel of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), Dubinskiy was employed by Russia's military intelligence agency GRU and Pulatov was a former soldier of the Russian special forces, Spetsnaz-GRU.

Ukraine's Kharchenko had no military background, but is believed to have led a combat unit in Donetwsk in July 2014.

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