17/18 July 2014

From Moscow: 'Forgive us' 

17 July 2014: 16:49 BST, A passenger jet belonging to Malaysia Airlines reportedly crashed in eastern Ukraine. The plane, travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, apparently had 295 people on board and crashed near the town of Snezhnoe.

Donetsk people's republic deny that the rebels shot down the Malaysian airlines plane. A reported member of the republic's security council said the rebels only have weapons able to shoot down a plane at 3,000 metres and blamed Ukrainian military forces for the attack. But officials from Ukraine's defence ministry and national security council said the rebels have Buk surface-to-air missiles able to shoot down planes at such elevations and suggested one was used in the attack. This is the third tragic incident in recent days after Ukrainian military An-26 and Su-25 jets were shot down from Russian territory.

By 19:30 BST, a website attributed to a separatist leader suggests rebels may have shot down MH17. But it has since been taken down and details remain unclear. The site featured a comment saying "We just downed an An-26 near Torez. It's down somewhere near Progress mine," which suggests rebel forces may have believed the passenger jet to be a Ukrainian military transport plane. The page, on the VKontakte social network, is attributed to Igor Girkin, who goes by the nom de guerre Strelkov and is the self-proclaimed military commander of the rebels. The page has been posting for rebels affiliated with Strelkov for weeks, and has some 130,000 followers.

By 20:00 BST: Jonathan Eyal, director of the Royal United Services Institute: firing a missile required knowledge of how to use radar, how to lock onto a target and a host of other steps beyond the average Kalashnikov carrying rebel. "If the plane was shot down, it could only have been shot down by a state authority … The only country that has a persistent policy of trying to prevent Ukrainians controlling airspace is Russia. Russia has taken an interest in shooting down aircraft and forcing Ukraine to use ground troops."

22:16: Putin issues a statement blaming Ukraine for the tragedy, because of their renewed military action in Eastern Ukraine saying "this tragedy would not have happened if there were peace in this land, or in any case, if [Kyiv] had not renewed hostilities in south-eastern Ukraine." A spokesperson for the Kremlin said the notion of any Russian hand was "stupidity".

23:14: The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission has reported that because the crash site is in rebel-controlled Ukrainian territory, officials have not been able to access it yet. Poroshenko began negotiating a humanitarian corridor to allow access. 

The OSCE's Michael Bociurkiw reported the day after, "unfortunately the task was made very difficult. Upon arrival at the site ... we encountered armed personnel who acted in a very impolite and unprofessional manner. Some of them even looked slightly intoxicated." The gunmen claimed to have recovered both flight recorders from the aircraft. 

18 July 2014: An emergency meeting of the UN Security Council is held. However, the 15-member Security Council has held more than a dozen meetings on the Ukraine crisis, but has taken no formal action due to the deep disagreements among Russia, Britain, France and the United States – four of its five veto-wielding members.

Germany also seems to be reluctant to follow through on increased sanctions on Russia, due to fear of losing trade with Russian business partners: 'German jobs at risk' once again seems to trump actual sanctions against Russia for their obvious involvement in funding, and enabling, the pro-Russian separatist rebels.

Excerpt from Guardian Editorial: 
This should be a moment for shame, for reflection, and for reconsideration. But, of course, what we have instead is a rush to avoid responsibility, a flood of disinformation, and a chorus of denials. The pro-Russian rebels say it was not their doing, in spite of much circumstantial evidence that it was. President Vladimir Putin, slyly skirting the question of where the arms and munitions sustaining the rebels are coming from, says that the fault must lie with the state over whose territory the incident occurred, thus blaming the Ukrainian government for the hostilities in the eastern part of that country while making no mention of his own continued military meddling in the same region. Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, says that the crash should be investigated as "an act of terrorism". That seems tendentious since, by definition, terrorist acts have to be intentional, and nothing about the fate of the Malaysian plane suggests that those who shot it down intended or wanted to kill civilians.