People walk amongst the debris, at the crash site of a passenger plane near the village of Grabovo, Ukraine, Thursday, July 17, 2014. Photo: AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky Moscow has a lot of explaining to do about Thursday’s crash of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 civilian airliner near the Russian-Ukrainian border.
Ukraine has called what happened to Flight 17 early in its journey from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur “a terrorist attack.”
Mass murder is another term that accurately describes the sudden deaths of 295 passengers and crew, whose bodies are now strewn across more than 20 kilometres of the eastern Ukrainian countryside.
It takes an advanced surface-to-air missile (SAM) and technical know-how to bring down a jumbo jet flying, as the aircraft was, at 10,000 metres. Pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine are not believed to possess such a weapon. Their shoulder-fired SAMs, which have been used in recent weeks to shoot down several Ukrainian helicopters and low-flying military transport, can only strike targets flying lower than about 3,000 metres.
Ukraine possesses Soviet-era missiles — the Buk missile system — that could have carried out such an attack. But there has not been a single previous report that Ukrainian forces have fired any missiles and it is highly improbable that they would have done so now as the rebels do not have any aircraft for them to shoot at.
This image taken from video, Thursday July 17, 2014, shows a guidebook found in the wreckage of a passenger plane carrying 295 people after it was shot down Thursday as it flew over Ukraine, near the village of Hrabove, in eastern Ukraine. Malaysia Airlines tweeted that it lost contact with one of its flights as it was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over Ukrainian airspace. AP Photo/Channel 1
If this was a missile strike, which is what Malaysia, western governments and the U.S. intelligence community believes, there are only three logical explanations as to who launched the attack. Either rebels led by Russian citizens captured such a weapon system from the Ukrainians, as they claimed last week, or Russia supplied the missile to the rebels or Russian forces were directly responsible for firing it either from rebel-controlled territory or from just across the border.
Whatever happened, the U.S. will know where it came from and what it was. The U.S. has satellites designed to track the heat signature of the rocket engines of such missiles with pinpoint accuracy. So, presumably, do the Russians.
If forensic experts get access to the crash sight, they should also be able to get an understanding of exactly what struck the aircraft. Ominously, however, early indications are that aircraft went down in separatist-held territory, amid reports on the BBC and elsewhere, rebels there intend to send whatever data they find to Russia for analysis.
Pro-Russian rebels have already denied any part in this crime. Russian President Vladimir Putin was reported to have said late Thursday that the country where the attack took place is responsible because it was engaged in a war there.
In this image taken from video, Thursday July 17, 2014, people walk among the debris at the crash site after a passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down Thursday as it flew over Ukraine, near the village of Hrabove, in eastern Ukraine. AP Photo / Channel 1
But the conflict in Ukraine has been fed by the Kremlin since the Russian parliament authorized the use of Russian forces there after a coup in late February overthrew their ally, Viktor Yanukovych.
I was in the Crimean port of Balaklava the night that Russian troops wearing black ski masks arrived there. It was easy to tell that they were not locally based Russian sailors and Marines because the vehicles carried license plates from southern and central Russia and the troops had vehicles, communications gear, body armour and uniforms that had not previously been seen in Crimea.
One young soldier guarding the airport in Simferopol used the Russian words for “of course,” when I asked him if he had come from Russia.
Putin denied, at the time, Russia sent forces into Crimea. But in a television interview a few weeks later he breezily acknowledged that he had ordered Russian troops to go there.
At about the same time I saw identically dressed ‘little green men,’ as these soldiers came to be known, in eastern Ukraine as separatists seized government buildings. Within a few days the ‘little green men’ had totally disappeared. But some rebels acknowledged that Russian military advisers were quietly helping them.
In this image taken from video, Thursday July 17, 2014, showing part of the wreckage of a passenger plane carrying 295 people after it was shot down Thursday as it flew over Ukraine, near the village of Hrabove, in eastern Ukraine. AP Photo / Channel 1
There is also the mystery of how the rebels have ended up with tanks and armoured personnel carriers with lots of evidence that they have brazenly crossed the border from Russia in long columns.
Russia has vehemently denied any involvement in any of this. However, over time they have become harder and harder to believe. Moscow is up to its eyeballs in the Ukrainian debacle. In fact, the two most senior rebels are Russian citizens with no obvious previous ties to Ukraine.
The military leader of the insurgency in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic is Igor Girkin, a Russian national who according to the BBC once worked for Russian military intelligence and whose nom de guerre is Strelkov. The Donetsk republic’s “president” is another Russian, Alexander Borodai, who briefly worked as an adviser to the new Russian regime in Crimea.
Hard questions must also be asked of European civilian air authorities. Why on earth was a passenger aircraft flying a track over air space in eastern Ukraine only one day after a Ukrainian aircraft was shot down in the same air space?
Photo shows Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 leaving Schiphol Airport in Schiphol, the Netherlands, on July 17, 2014. Malaysia Airlines said on July 17 that it had “lost contact” with one of its passenger planes whose last known position was over eastern Ukraine, amid speculation it had been shot down. Fred Neeleman/AFP/Getty Images
But most of the attention must focus on Russian involvement in this incident and the larger question of what Moscow has been doing for months now to destabilize Central Europe.
This tragic fate of the passengers and crew may finally get the attention of craven western European leaders who have avoided facing what Russia has been up to in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, lest any response interfere with imports of natural gas and exports of luxury cars and high-end European real estate values that have become highly dependent on Russian money of dubious provenance.
The deaths of 154 Dutch nationals as well as many Australians, Malaysians, Indonesians, Britons, Germans and Belgians, as well as one Canadian and dozens of American, British and French citizens may finally compel dramatic punitive economic sanctions to try to force Russia to behave like a responsible member of the European and global community.
A young girl places her head on a teddy bear as people light candles and place flowers in front of the Embassy of the Netherlands in Kyiv on July 17, 2014, to commemorate passengers of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 carrying 295 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur which crashed in eastern Ukraine. SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty Images
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