by Derek Davison
When flight MH17 was hit with a missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17, US officials immediately blamed pro-Russian separatists for bringing the plane down. Secretary of State John Kerry said the evidence “obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists,” using “a system that was [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
When flight MH17 was hit with a missile over eastern Ukraine on July 17, US officials immediately blamed pro-Russian separatists for bringing the plane down. Secretary of State John Kerry said the evidence “obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists,” using “a system that was transferred from Russia.” The preliminary evidence — including photographs allegedly showing a Buk system in the area where the aircraft was shot down, satellite imagery supposedly showing a missile plume that trailed back to separatist-controlled territory, and intercepts of separatists purportedly discussing the shooting — supported Kerry’s assertion, but was at best circumstantial (Kerry himself called it “extraordinary circumstantial evidence”), and in the case of the missile plume, has not been made public.
Doubts have been raised about the veracity of the initial MH17 story, particularly by independent journalist Robert Parry, who claims that a reliable (though anonymous) source told him that US satellite imagery actually suggests the flight was shot down by a Buk battery under the control of Ukrainian forces. Parry’s reporting initially suggested that the battery fired on MH17 accidentally, or due to carelessness on the part of its crew, but he has since reported (based on additional anonymous sourcing) that the attack may have been a deliberate attempt to assassinate Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was returning from the World Cup in Brazil that day and whose plane may have resembled MH17 in both physical appearance and flight path.
Obviously Parry’s story suffers from its reliance on anonymous sources and the lack of any publicly available evidence supporting it. However, it remains a plausible alternative to the Western narrative about MH17, in large part due to the failure of the US government to bolster the initial circumstantial evidence it raised against the separatists with anything more substantive (it claims doing so would compromise its intelligence-gathering capabilities). Parry is certainly not the only journalist to notice this failure, as shown by a heated July 25 exchange between AP reporter Matt Lee and State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. As Gawker’s Matthew Phelan points out, the evidence that has been made public so far is hardly impressive considering the massive US intelligence apparatus that is supposed to be investigating what really happened to MH17. Yet for the most part, American mainstream news outlets have hardly challenged the US’ official MH17 story.
Others have publicly raised questions. A group of former intelligence and foreign service officials called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) released a public memo on July 29 to President Obama via Parry’s website. The authors argued that “the charges against Russia should be rooted in solid, far more convincing evidence” and asked that “if you [Obama] indeed have more conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay.” VIPS has also critiqued Colin Powell’s February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council making the case for the Iraq War, the Obama administration’s unwillingness to investigate and prosecute those behind the Bush-era torture program, and last year’s plans to launch cruise missile strikes against Syria. Granted, some of this group’s claims have been seriously challenged.
In any case, if VIPS demand for more conclusive evidence seemed premature early on, their demands seem considerably more reasonable now that Russia’s supposed culpability in MH17′s downing has been used to justify additional US and EU sanctions. Yet there has still been no effort by the Obama administration to release more substantive evidence to support allegations of the separatists’ culpability. Gawker spoke to members of VIPS, who argued that given all the assets that must have been sent to eastern Ukraine in the midst of the ongoing fighting, the US government probably has substantial evidence showing what really happened to MH17. They also said that the seriousness of the deteriorating US-Russia relationship warranted releasing that evidence even if doing so would compromise intelligence-gathering operations. “We’re talking about the possibility of an armed confrontation with Russia. I mean, you couldn’t think of higher stakes,” retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Gawker.
Barring a massive escalation by Russia, the separatist war in Ukraine is nearing its end. Ukrainian forces have reached one of the two remaining rebel strongholds, Luhansk, where “street fighting” is said to be ongoing between the army and the remaining separatist resistance. The other stronghold, Donetsk, has been taking heavy shelling from Ukrainian forces and is unlikely to hold out much longer. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is due to meet with Putin in Minsk next Tuesday, in an effort to reach an agreement that would end the fighting.
At this critical juncture, one hopes that Western media will keep a watchful eye on events in eastern Ukraine as they unfold. Poroshenko, and his supporters in Europe and America, must be held accountable for the treatment of defeated rebels and the Donetsk and Luhansk civilians who have been essentially caught in the crossfire over the past several months. He must also be held accountable for the actions of neo-Nazi militias like the Azov Battalion, which continues to serve openly on the front lines of the Ukrainian advance despite its extremism and the potential threat it poses to post-war reconciliation. When civilians are targeted, as in the August 18 shelling of a refugee convoy fleeing Luhansk, the true story about such incidents must be told. The failure of leading news media outlets to get more answers from Washington about what really happened to MH17 does not bode well for future coverage of this conflict.
Photo: A memorial at the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was reportedly show down while flying over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
]]>by Derek Davison
A week of increasing tension between Ukraine and Russia was given a terrible cap on July 17 when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), a Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, was apparently shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The tragedy was [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
A week of increasing tension between Ukraine and Russia was given a terrible cap on July 17 when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17), a Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, was apparently shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The tragedy was another blow to Malaysia Airlines, whose flight MH370 disappeared, probably somewhere in the Indian Ocean, on March 8, but the larger concern with respect to the downing of MH17 has been the impact it will have on the crisis in Ukraine.
Immediate efforts were made to identify how the aircraft was shot down and who was behind the attack. US and Ukrainian officials were quick to claim that a surface to air missile had caused the crash, and on this point “independent aviation experts” seem to agree. Suspicion has centered on the theory that a Russian/Soviet-made SA-11 Buk mobile anti-aircraft missile was responsible for bringing the plane down. Prior to this, the only publicly known anti-aircraft weapons that had been used in this conflict were handheld units with much lower effective ceilings, which may help to explain why MH17 was flying over eastern Ukraine despite the ongoing fighting; it was at an altitude thought to be above any hypothetical threat.
Who’s Responsible?
But identifying exactly who shot the plane down is a bigger challenge, especially since all three of the most obvious suspects — the Ukrainian military, the Russian military, and the pro-Russia Donbas separatists — have all denied any responsibility for the incident. Russian media is heavily pushing the theory that the plane was shot down by the Ukrainians, either by a Ukrainian fighter plane that it claims was flying close to MH17 at the time of the incident or by one of a number of Buk batteries that it claims the Ukrainian military was operating in the area at the time of the incident. The latter theory has also been advanced by American reporter Robert Parry.
Assuming that NATO is correct in claiming that it has evidence of a renewed Russian military buildup along its Ukrainian border, there is a possibility that a Russian-operated Buk battery mistook MH17 for a Ukrainian military aircraft and shot it down. However, US officials seem to be convinced that it was the separatists who shot down the craft — Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN that the evidence “obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists.” That evidence includes satellite imagery that may show the path of the missile, recordings of what Kiev claims are phone calls involving top separatist leaders, and intercepts from Russian social media that suggest the rebels acknowledged shooting down what they believed was another military transport in the area where MH17 went down.
If it was the rebels who shot down the plane, it raises questions as to how they obtained the Buk battery in the first place. The separatists have taken small arms (including shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles) and vehicles from Ukrainian military outposts since the conflict began in March, and there is evidence that other weapons and equipment have been trafficked into eastern Ukraine from Russia. But the Buk system is considerably more powerful and advanced than anything the rebels were known to have in their possession. They may have seized a battery from the Ukrainian military, but Russian media reported in late June that Ukrainian separatists “took” a Buk system under Russian control, which could suggest either that they stole the battery or that it was supplied to them, and videos have surfaced online that claim to show a Buk battery or batteries in the rebel-held towns of Torez and Snizhne around the time that MH17 crashed, which reportedly conforms with what US satellite imagery has shown.
Worsening Crisis
The already difficult task of investigating the crash has been made almost impossible by the situation in eastern Ukraine. Under international aviation regulations Ukrainian authorities should take the lead in the investigation, but the Ukrainian government simply doesn’t control the part of the country where the aircraft’s wreckage now lies. For several days after the crash, separatists refused to allow investigators unfettered access to the crash site and to MH17’s data recorders without a ceasefire agreement from Kiev, which drew ire from a number of world leaders. Rebels were even observed loading bodies from the crash site onto trains and taking them away. On July 21, President Barack Obama called on Putin to compel the separatists to comply with the investigation, and the UN Security Council unanimously (including Russia) adopted a resolution demanding full access to the crash site. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak later announced that the separatists had agreed to turn over the bodies and the data recorders to Dutch and Malaysian representatives, and that the investigators would henceforth have full access to the crash site.
The MH17 disaster was only the latest in a string of provocations that have raised the stakes in the area over the past week. On July 13, Russian authorities warned of “irreversible consequences” after the Russian village of Donetsk (which has the same name as the Ukrainian city that is one of the hubs of that country’s separatist rebellion) was struck by what Russia claimed was a Ukrainian artillery shell, killing one and injuring two. The following day, in an attack that foreshadowed the MH17 tragedy, a Ukrainian AN-26 military cargo plane was shot down near the Russian border. Ukrainian authorities claimed that the AN-26, like MH17, was flying too high to have been hit by portable anti-aircraft missiles, which has been disputed by analysts but which, if true, would again suggest the involvement of Russia or Russian weapons in the attack. Then, on July 15, an airstrike hit an apartment building in Snizhne, killing 11, with Kiev again accusing Moscow of perpetrating the attack even as the rebels pointed the finger at Kiev. Ukrainian forces reportedly took control of the Donetsk airport on July 21, suggesting that a major offensive was underway against one of the few remaining rebel strongholds.
If it can be proven that the separatists did shoot down MH17, especially if there is evidence that they did it with Russian support, it could lead to a significant increase in the amount of economic pressure that the US and EU are prepared to bring to bear against Moscow. Obama’s July 21 statement promised that there would be “costs” to Russia’s continued support of the separatists, on top of the new sanctions that the US levied on Russian banks, energy companies, and defense contractors on July 16, the day before MH17 was shot down. The fact that MH17 originated in Amsterdam and that most of its passengers were European could also spur stronger European sanctions than we’ve seen to date.
Photo: A memorial at the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for the victims of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was reportedly show down while flying over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, killing all 298 people on board.
]]>