Path of Buk “3×2” from Donetsk to Snizhe on July 17, 2014. Credit: Ukraine@war
In June, 2014, a convoy of military vehicles left the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade base near Kursk, Russia, and drove to the city of Millerovo near the Ukrainian border. As revealed through an analysis of social media images organized by the British group Bellingcat, the convoy included a Buk mobile missile with a three-digit number written on the side: a “3” followed by an illegible digit, then a “2.” The following month, on July 17, the same Buk was photographed around noon being pulled on a trailer in the separatist-held city of Donetsk. It was subsequently filmed traveling eastward through the towns of Zuhres, Shakhtarsk, and Torez before arriving at the village of Snizhe around 1.30pm. Over the next three hours, numerous commercial airliners flew overhead. Then, at around 4.20pm, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 approached from the northwest at an altitude of 33,000 feet. A Buk fired a missile and the plane was destroyed, killing all 298 people aboard. Later the “3×2” Buk launcher was filmed through the separatist-controlled city of Luhansk with one missile missing.
I remember exactly where I was standing the exact moment that I heard the news that another Malaysia Airlines 777 had gone down, this time over eastern Ukraine. My first thought, after I picked my jaw off the ground, was: Well, that settles it.
I’d been exploring the possibility that MH370 had been hijacked north for months already, and one of my biggest stumbling blocks was that it required the Russian political leadership be willing to kidnap or kill 239 innocent civilians.
MH17 showed that they had no such qualms.
At first I imagined that the media would quickly put two and two together and see the link between MH370 and MH17. After all, the odds against the events being coincidental were huge. At the start of the year, there were 15 Malaysia Airlines 777s, out of a total global commercial airliner fleet of about 19,000. The chance, given one Malaysia Airlines 777 disaster, that the next major plane accident would also involve a Malaysian 777 was less than one in a thousand.
Each event also occured in a suspiciously similar sequence of events. You’ll recall that on March 6, President Obama imposed sanctions against Russia as punishment for its incursions into Ukraine. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, responded by saying that sanctions “would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang.” The next day MH370 went missing.
On Wednesday, July 16, Obama announced new sanctions against Russia. Putin responded with a public statement warning that sanctions “generally have a boomerang effect,” and added, “I am certain that this is harmful to the U.S. Administration and American people’s long-term strategic national interests.” The next day, at the end of a phone call with Obama, Putin broke the news of the MH17 shoot-down.
Needless to say, the media never spotted a connection. Instead, consensus quickly formed around the idea that the shoot-down of MH17 had been the result of carelessness by inadequately trained militiamen.
A major reason for this, I think, is that Russian had no apparent motive for shooting down MH17, just as it had no apparent motive for hijacking MH370.
It’s dangerous, however, to theorize about what another person will or will not do based on your perception of what their best interests are. What seems irrational to you might seem entirely rational given the desires, fears, goals and perceptions that only they themselves are aware of.
Ultimately, rather than assuming that people won’t do certain things because we think we wouldn’t do the same thing in their shoes, it’s better to leave an open mind and work backwards from what they have actually done. If I say to you, “You know that guy who lives down the street, John Wayne Gacy? I think he has a tendency to randomly murder boys,” it would be entirely understandable for you to say, “That’s outrageous, that kind of thing rarely happen, and anyway, what’s the motive?” But if it turns out that there are a whole bunch of shallow graves in the crawl space under his house, your qualms about the lack of motive disappear.
As I’ve explained in earlier sections, if MH370 turns out not to have gone south, then it winds up on Putin’s doorstep tied up in a bow.
Likewise, only the most diaphonous veil of deniability shrouds Moscow’s responsibility for MH17. The claim that the separatist movement is a spontaneous grass-roots phenomenon is a fiction. Moscow didn’t even try to keep its story straight; it awards medals to soldiers who’ve served there, and makes no effort to conceal the background of people like Igor Strelkov, the Russian Army intelligence officer who led the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic at the time of the MH17 shoot-down and claimed responsibility for it via social media.
There is a legal doctrine that applies in cases of military malfeasance called “command responsibility.” In essence, this states that an officer is responsible for the behavior of the troops under his command. After WWI, a German officer named Emil Müller was convicted under this doctrine for allowing guards at a prison camp he commanded to cruelly mistreat prisoners of war. After WWII, Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried, convicted and hanged for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines.
If a military unit commits a war crime, then it is not an acceptable excuse for the commanding officer to simply say, “Don’t look at me, I’m not the one who did the foul deed.” The military is comprised of individuals who are trained to follow orders. And when it comes to a mobile anti-aircraft missile battery, the single most important order is: “fire.”
Russia dispatched the Buk unit that shot down MH17; ergo Russia bears moral and legal responsible for the act, just as the German government bore responsibility for the sinking of the Lusitania.
And that, I think, is the key point. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the US was ready to go to war with Germany. But the United States is not ready to go to war with Russia, and neither are our allies. And so, in the face of what looks like a very clear cut case of illegal aggression, the US has chosen to look the other way, pinning the blame on the rebels only in so far as they needed to deflect Moscow’s claims that the Ukrainian armed forces were responsible.
So if we assume that Russia was behind both MH17 and MH370, what was the motive? Why pick on Malaysia?
I confess that I do not know.
If I had to guess, however, I would say that perhaps MH370 was a demonstration of prowess, a way to say to the West, “you can hurt us with sanctions, but don’t sleep too soundly at night, because we can hurt you in ways that you can’t even imagine.” That particular flight was targeted only because the Russians had figured out a hack that only would work only under very particular circumstances, and MH370 happened to fit them.
MH17, then, might have been a reprise, in far blunter fashion—a way of saying, in effect, “The remember the last time we zapped you? You hurt us again, we’re hurting you again.” This time, victim’s aircraft type and livery were chosen as a kind of calling card, like a unit insignia left behind on the victim of a massacre.
“For Russia, this may have been a way of saying, the day after sanctions, ‘You want to see what sanctions are going to get you? We can prove it’s going to suck,’” former CIA operative Robert Baer told me.
Of course, for this line of reasoning to make sense, the American government would have to have already understood what happened to MH370, at a time when no one else did. That’s a big if. But I do see some evidence that this could be the case.
On March 15, just one week after MH370 disappeared, US officials were already pushing for the conclusion that the plane had gone south. Remember, at the time the existence of “ping rings” had been disclosed, and a map of the final one released, but Inmarsat was still trying to make sense of the BFO data and hadn’t yet nailed down its significance. To everyone trying to make sense of this bizarre case, it looked like the northern and southern routes were both wide open. But once government officials began saying that the plane went south, the media quickly aligned in agreement.
And why did US officials reach this conclusion? Explained CNN:
Because the northern parts of the traffic corridor include some tightly guarded airspace over India, Pakistan, and even some U.S. installations in Afghanistan, U.S. authorities believe it more likely the aircraft crashed into waters outside of the reach of radar south of India, a U.S. official told CNN. If it had flown farther north, it’s likely it would have been detected by radar.
Likely would have been detected by radar, mind you. Not definitely would have been detected by radar. (At this point it was already known that MH370 had flown right through Indonsesia’s radar zone without being detected.) Yet on the basis of that questionable guesstimate alone, the US government shut down speculation about a northern route.
Perhaps the real reason that US officials stopped the conversation is that they didn’t want to open up a can of worms, just as they later kept an arm’s length from the pretty-much-already-open can of worms that is MH17.
But if the West’s containment strategy toward Putin is to leave him alone and hope that eventually he’ll calm down, it does not appear to be working. As I write this, Russian planes are testing their neighbors’ airspace with increasing aggression. Russian subs are probing their waters. More troops and heavier weapons are pouring into the separatist enclaves in Ukraine. Russian media outlets are talking about outright war—and not proxy brush wars, either. Big war.
While Putin is floating visions of World War Three, the West is chuckling nervously and assuring itself that it’s really all just bluster. He wouldn’t do that—would he?
After all, what would be the motive?
(That’s all, for now…)
