lorddreadnought | Entries tagged with #ukraine

Tatyana Montyan, an activist of the Kremlin puppet "Donetsk People's Republic" has joined the so-called "March of Equally" in Kyiv.

It turns out that "European values" as interpreted by "LGBT activists" pretty stinks of Moscow. As you know, the "March of Equally", initiated by LGBT community has been failed June 6 in Kiev because of the Ukrainian nationalists' actions, but let us pay you attention to the participants of this "deviant sabbath", and especially to one person - Tatyana Montyan, an activist of the "Novorossia" and the "DNR," supporter of Putin`s policy as well as the "Eurasian Union."

Taking participate in the "parade"mrs Montyan called herself a "LGBT community" rights defender. Moreover, she has repeatedly made anti-Ukrainian and pro-Kremlin statements.

As you can see, various degenerative phenomenas and actions have the ability to attract all kind of parasites of various political orientations - pro-Western and pro-Moscow.

Head of separatist Sparta Battalion says he shot prisoners following the battle for Donetsk airport, prompting war crimes investigation by Ukrainian government.

A Russian fighter has confessed on tape to killing 15 Ukrainian prisoners of war, which legal experts say could be considered evidence of war crimes if the authenticity of the recording is confirmed.

The statement was made by Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, in a telephone conversation with a journalist on 3 April.

Motorola, the head of the pro-Russian militant group the Sparta Battalion, was asked about allegations that he had murdered Ukrainian prisoner of war Ihor Branovytsky in January.

He replied: “I don’t give a fuck about what I am accused of, believe it or not. I shot 15 prisoners dead. No comment. I kill if I want to. I don’t if I don’t.”

The recording will form part of an investigation into the torture and murder of Branovytsky by Kremlin backed-insurgents, said Vasil Vovk, the head of the Ukrainian security service’s main investigative department, at the soldier’s funeral.

A case has been opened under the country’s crimes against humanity legislation and may be sent to the Hague-based International Criminal Court, he said.

Vovk confirmed that Motorola was a suspect in the Branovytsky case and might be tried in absentia.

Amnesty International said this week it had evidence the separatist forces had carried out extrajudicial killings, and added that Motorola’s comments needed to be investigated thoroughly.

Denis Krivosheev, Europe and Central Asia Deputy Director at the organisation, said: “The new evidence of these summary killings confirms what we have suspected for a long time. The question now is: what are the separatist leaders going to do about it?

“The torture, ill-treatment and killing of captured, surrendered or wounded soldiers are war crimes. These claims must be promptly, thoroughly and impartially investigated, and the perpetrators prosecuted.”

Motorola, 32, a Russian citizen, previously fought against Islamist insurgents in Chechnya and worked as a blue-collar worker and a lifeguard. He become known in July last year after staging a “separatist wedding” in Donetsk.

The Sparta Battalion played a significant role in the takeover of Donetsk airportby Kremlin-backed militants in January, where Branovytsky is reported to have fought. He was later taken prisoner and killed.

That the soldier was captured alive has been allegedly verified by two YouTube videos filmed after the fall of the airport. One is thought to show him standing in the ruins of the airport terminal, and another reportedly shows him in a line-up of prisoners asked to say their names to the camera.

At the soldier’s memorial service, Anatoly Svyryd, a sergeant from the same force, said that both he and Branovytsky had been taken prisoner by the Russian-backed Sparta Battalion. Svyryd claims he was taken to a hospital in Donetsk, while about 12 prisoners, including Branovytsky, were transferred to the barracks of the Sparta Battalion in the city.

Another charge against Motorola and his battalion is of the torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war, banned under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Yury Sova, a fighter of the 80th paratrooper brigade, said he and other prisoners had been attacked by Motorola’s men for extended periods.

“We were beaten for six to seven hours,” he said. He claims to have been transported to the battalion’s barracks alongside Branovytsky, and says he witnessed the killing. “He was beaten brutally, and a lot of his bones were broken.”

The original recording of the conversation with Motorola could potentially be used as evidence in court, said Valentyna Telychenko, a prominent human rightslawyer. “Subsequently there must be an analysis of his voice and the authenticity of the digital media,” she said.

However, there are obstacles to transferring the cases against Motorola and others to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. So far, Ukraine has not ratified the Rome Statute, which recognises the court’s jurisdiction in specific countries.

Ukraine’s supreme court did pass a resolution on 4 February recognising the court’s jurisdiction, however the president has not yet formally sent the resolution to the Hague.

Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of Donetsk Oblast’s police department,published the names of 40 Sparta Battalion fighters on 5 April on Facebook.

“The country must know its ‘heroes’ by name,” he said. “They have the blood of our compatriots on their hands.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/10/russian-fighter-ukraine-motorola

Viktor Kadochnikov, a Russian blogger, poses 20 questions that he suggests those who support Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine should be asking themselves. If they do and if they are honest, they won’t be able to support the Kremlin leader’s policies any more.

Below, in summary form, are the 20 questions he says they should be confronted with.

1. “Why are Donetsk and Luhansk ‘Novorossiya,’ but when a passenger jet crashes in its territory, it is instantly transformed into Ukraine?”

2. “Mercenary activity is a crime in Russia. Why don’t ‘the militia men’–who come from Russia and are paid for combat–not fall under this provision of the law?”

3. “How can one explain the fact” that Moscow has brought criminal charges [exclusively] against Russian citizens who are fighting for Ukraine but not against Russians who are fighting in Ukraine against the Ukrainian government?

4. Do you consider the use by the [Russian] ‘militias’ of civilians as human shields something deserving of respect?

5. “The war is costing Ukraine several million dollars a day. It is logical to assume that it isn’t costing its opponent any less. Do you really think that Russia isn’t giving the so-called Novorossiya military and financial help?”

6. “Why is it that everywhere where the so-called militias ‘liberate,’ there is war? … Why are the so-called [Ukrainian] ‘punitive operations’ only where there are ‘militias’?”

7. “Why must Ukraine hand over to [Russian] band formations territories that legally belong to it? If the Ukrainian military doesn’t want to do this, does that make them punitive detachments?”

8. Given the number of times Vladimir Putin has changed his story on Crimea, “is it possible to believe him now when he asserts that there are no Russian forces in the Donbas? If so, then why?”

9. How would you react if some American said–as Igor “Strelkov” Girkin has–that without their invasion, nothing much would have occurred?

10. The Russian defense ministry has promised to provide five million rubles to the families of soldiers who “have died at the Ukrainian border. Are you not interested in why [the details of their deaths] are being hidden from you?”

11. Given that Moscow forcefully disperses opposition meetings and imprisons its participants on made-up charges, how do you think Vladimir Putin would react if some group seized administration buildings and proclaimed the creation of its own statehood on Russian territory? Would Putin take measures or perhaps sit down with the terrorists “to negotiate” as he demands that Kyiv do?

12. “Why does every Ukrainian patriot, who wears Ukrainian symbols, sings the Ukrainian hymn, supports the unity of his country and speaks against separatism automatically become a Banderite and fascist? Under what article of the [Russian Federation] criminal code?”

13. Are all pieces of evidence of the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine–even those offered by Russian soldiers themselves–forgeries produced in the West?

14. “Comrade Putin frequently has declared that Russia is not a side in the conflict and that he personally respects and supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine. If that is really so, then why hasn’t Russia closed the border from its side so that volunteers (and not only they) from the Russian Federation do not have the opportunity to cross it in order to fight against the territorial integrity of Ukraine?”

15. The Russian government last August explained the appearance of Russian troops in Ukraine by saying that they had crossed the border by mistake. “Do you really believe this? What would be your reaction if NATO soldiers ‘accidentally became confused’ somewhere near Vladivostok?”

16. “Why has Russia not once condemned the ‘Novorossiya’ militants and not once called on them to lay down their arms first? At the same time, officials of the Russian Federation have frequently called on Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms and leave the Ukrainian Donbas to the bandits. Why all [Russian] federal media gives positive coverage to only one side?”

17. How do you explain the fact that the forces of the ‘DNR’ and ‘LNR,’ hard-pressed as they were last August, suddenly “opened a new front in the direction of Mariupol and seized Novoazovsk? Who did this in fact: the forces of ‘the militias,’ whom the Ukrainian army had successfully contained or Russian soldiers without uniform markings who supposedly weren’t there?”

18. Why does Belarus, a state aligned so “close to Russia, support the territorial integrity of Ukraine and not agree with Putin’s imperialist plans? Why does Lukashenka, Putin’s ally in the Customs Union believe that there is no fascism as a mass phenomenon in Ukraine and say that it is necessary to destroy the militants fighting against Ukraine?”

19. Do you believe Russian officials when they say that the 12 Pskov paratroopers did not die fighting in Ukraine but rather “by chance” died from heart attacks, suicides and accidents all at the same time?

20. “What are the ‘Novorossiya’ militants fighting for and what is the use of what they are doing?”

Strategy documents leaked by an anonymous Russian hacker imply that Kremlin has been recruiting an army of Internet trolls to spread his propaganda on website comment sections, Buzzfeed reports.

“Foreign media are currently actively forming a negative image of the Russian Federation in the eyes of the global community,” one of the group members, Svetlana Boiko, wrote in a strategy document. “Additionally, the discussions formed by comments to those articles are also negative in tone.”

“Like any brand formed by popular opinion, Russia has its supporters (‘brand advocates’) and its opponents. The main problem is that in the foreign internet community, the ratio of supporters and opponents of Russia is about 20/80 respectively.” Led by Igor Osadchy (though he denies any connection) out of St. Petersburg, the trolls were organized in April and are allegedly controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. According to documents, there are hundreds of Russians backed by the Kremlin who are hired to specifically promote Putin’s agenda on the web, namely his movements in the Ukraine.

From Buzzfeed: The documents show instructions provided to the commenters that detail the workload expected of them. On an average working day, the Russians are to post on news articles 50 times. Each blogger is to maintain six Facebook accounts publishing at least three posts a day and discussing the news in groups at least twice a day. By the end of the first month, they are expected to have won 500 subscribers and get at least five posts on each item a day.

On Twitter, the bloggers are expected to manage 10 accounts with up to 2,000 followers and tweet 50 times a day. They are to post messages along themes called “American Dream” and “I Love Russia.” The archetypes for the accounts are called Handkerchief, Gay Turtle, The Ghost of Marius the Giraffe, Left Breast, Black Breast, and Ass, for reasons that are not immediately clear. 21-year-old Katarina Aistova is believed to be one of these trolls. She posted the following comments on a WorldNetDaily article.

Comments such as these are suspected to be part of the Russian government’s consolidated effort to spread their ideals throughout web-based platforms. “The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn’t controlled by the Kremlin,” said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council. “That’s why they’re going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures.”

The trolling project’s finances are appropriately lavish for its considerable scale. A budget for April 2014, its first month, lists costs for 25 employees and expenses that together total over $75,000. The Internet Research Agency itself, founded last summer, now employs over 600 people and, if spending levels from December 2013 to April continue, is set to budget for over $10 million in 2014, according to the documents. Half of its budget is earmarked to be paid in cash.

Two Russian media reports partly based on other selections from the documents attest that the campaign is directly orchestrated by the Kremlin. Business newspaper Vedomosti, citing sources close to Putin’s presidential administration,said last week that the campaign was directly orchestrated by the government and included expatriate Russian bloggers in Germany, India, and Thailand.Novaya Gazeta claimed this week that the campaign is run by Evgeny Prigozhin, a restaurateur who catered Putin’s re-inauguration in 2012. Prigozhin hasreportedly orchestrated several other elaborate Kremlin-funded campaigns against opposition members and the independent media. Emails from the hacked trove show an accountant for the Internet Research Agency approving numerous payments with an accountant from Prigozhin’s catering holding, Concord.

Several people who follow the Russian internet closely told BuzzFeed the Internet Research Energy is only one of several firms believed to be employing pro-Kremlin comment trolls. That has long been suspected based on the comments under articles about Russia on many other sites, such as Kremlin propaganda network RT’s wildly successful YouTube channel. The editor of The Guardian’s opinion page recently claimed that the site was the victim of an “orchestrated campaign.”

Russian-language social networks are awash with accounts that lack the signs of real users, such as pictures, regular posting, or personal statements. These “dead souls,” as Vasily Gatov, a prominent Russian media analyst who blogs at Postjournalist, calls them, often surface to attack opposition figures or journalists who write articles critical of Putin’s government.

The puerility of many of the comments recalls the pioneering trolling of now-defunct Kremlin youth group Nashi, whose leaders extensively discussed commenting on Russian opposition websites in emails leaked by hackers in 2012. Analysts say Timur Prokopenko, former head of rival pro-Putin youth group Young Guard, now runs internet projects in the presidential administration.

“These docs are written in the same style and keep the same quality level,” said Alexei Sidorenko, a Poland-based Russian developer and net freedom activist. “They’re sketchy, incomplete, done really fast, have tables, copy-pastes — it’s the standard of a regular student’s work from Russian university.”

The group that hacked the emails, which were shared with BuzzFeed last week and later uploaded online, is a new collective that calls itself the Anonymous International, apparently unrelated to the global Anonymous hacker movement. In the last few months, the group has shot to notoriety after posting internal Kremlin files such as plans for the Crimean independence referendum, the list of pro-Kremlin journalists whom Putin gave awards for their Crimea coverage, and the personal email of eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov. None of the group’s leaks have been proven false.

In email correspondence with BuzzFeed, a representative of the group claimed they were “not hackers in the classical sense.”

“We are trying to change reality. Reality has indeed begun to change as a result of the appearance of our information in public,” wrote the representative, whose email account is named Shaltai Boltai, which is the Russian for tragic nursery rhyme hero Humpty Dumpty.

The leak from the Internet Research Agency is the first time specific comments under news articles can be directly traced to a Russian campaign.

Katarina Aistova, a 21-year-old former hotel receptionist, posted these comments on aWorldNetDaily article.

Kremlin supporters’ increased activity online over the Ukraine crisis suggests Russia wants to encourage dissent in America at the same time as stifling it at home. The online offensive comes on the heels of a series of official laws and signals clearly suggesting Russia wants to tighten the screws on its vibrant independent web. In the last 30 days alone, Putin claimed the internet was and always had been a “CIA project” and then signed a law that imposes such cumbersome restrictions on blogs and social media as to make free speech impossible.

“There’s no paradox here. It’s two sides of the same coin,” Igor Ashmanov, a Russian internet entrepreneur known for his pro-government views, told BuzzFeed. “The Kremlin is weeding out the informational field and sowing it with cultured plants. You can see what will happen if they don’t clear it out from the gruesome example of Ukraine.”

Gatov, who is the former head of Russia’s state newswire’s media analytics laboratory, told BuzzFeed the documents were part of long-term Kremlin plans to swamp the internet with comments. “Armies of bots were ready to participate in media wars, and the question was only how to think their work through,” he said. “Someone sold the thought that Western media, which specifically have to align their interests with their audience, won’t be able to ignore saturated pro-Russian campaigns and will have to change the tone of their Russia coverage to placate their angry readers.”

Pro-Russian accounts have been increasingly visible on social networks since Ukraine’s political crisis hit fever pitch in late February. One campaign, “Polite People,” promoted the invasion of Crimea with pictures of Russian troops posing alongside girls, the elderly, and cats. Russia’s famously internet-shy Foreign Ministry began to viciously mock the State Department’s digital diplomacy efforts. “Joking’s over,” its Facebook page read on April 1.

Other accounts make clear attempts to influence Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the country’s restive southeast. Western officials believe many of the Twitter accounts are operated by Russian secret services. One was removed after calling for and celebrating violent attacks on a bank owned by a virulently anti-Putin Ukrainian oligarch.

“This is similar to media dynamics we observed in the Syrian civil war,” said Matt Kodama, an analyst at the web intelligence firm Recorded Future. “Russian news channels broke stories that seemed tailored-made to reinforce pro-Assad narratives, and then Syrian social media authors pushed them.”

Other documents discuss the issues the Russian commenters run into when arguing with the regular audience on the American news sites, particularly the conservative ones. “Upon examining the tone of the comments on major articles on The Blaze that directly or indirectly cover Russia, we can take note of its negative direction,” the author wrote. “It is notable that the audience of the Blaze responds to the article ‘Hear Alan Grayson Actually Defend Russia’s Invasion of Crimea as a Good Thing,’ which generally gives a positive assessment of Russian actions in Ukraine, extremely negatively.”

But praise can be as problematic as scorn. “While studying America’s main media, comments that were pro-Russian in content were noticed,” the author wrote. “After detailed study of the discussions they contained, it becomes obvious: the audience interprets those comments extremely negatively. Moreover, users of internet resources assume that the comments in questions were either written for ideological reasons, or paid for.”

The documents align with the Kremlin’s new attention to the internet. Putin, who swiftly monopolized control over television after coming to power in 1999 and marginalized dissent to a few low-circulation newspapers, largely left the “Runet” alone during his first two terms in power, allowing it to flourish as a parallel world free of censorship and skewed toward the educated urban middle class. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s protégé who was president from 2008–12, made a show of embracing social media, but it never sat well with officials and Putin supporters. The gulf between Medvedev’s transparency drive and Russia’s Byzantine bureaucracy’s reluctance to change only highlighted his impotence, earning him the nickname “Microblogger” for his small stature.

“In the best case they looked funny, in the worst, their actions exposed their real motives,” said Katya Romanovskaya, co-author of KermlinRussia, a popular parody account mocking Medvedev’s clumsy efforts. “Twitter is an environment where you can instantly connect with your audience, answer direct questions, and give explanations — which Russian officials are completely incapable of. It goes against their bureaucratic and corrupt nature.”

The current internet crackdown comes after protests by middle-class Muscovites against Putin’s return to the presidency in early 2012, which were largely organized on Facebook and Twitter. All but a few officials have since abandoned the medium and many did so en masse last fall, raising suspicions they did so on Kremlin orders.

“Putin was never very fond of the internet even in the early 2000s,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in security services and cyber issues. “When he was forced to think about the internet during the protests, he became very suspicious, especially about social networks. He thinks there’s a plot, a Western conspiracy against him. He believes there is a very dangerous thing for him and he needs to put this thing under control.”

Last month, the deputy head of the Kremlin’s telecommunications watchdog said Twitter was a U.S. government tool and threatened to block it “in a few minutes” if the service did not block sites on Moscow’s request. Though the official received a reprimand (as well as a tongue-lashing on Facebook from Medvedev), the statement was widely seen as a trial balloon for expanding censorship. Twitter complied with a Russian request for the first time the following Monday and took down a Ukrainian nationalist account.

A new law that comes into effect in August also forces bloggers with more than 3,000 followers to register with the government. The move entails significant and cumbersome restrictions for bloggers, who previously wrote free of Russia’s complicated media law bureaucracy, while denying them anonymity and opening them up to political pressure.

“The internet has become the main threat — a sphere that isn’t controlled by the Kremlin,” said Pavel Chikov, a member of Russia’s presidential human rights council. “That’s why they’re going after it. Its very existence as we know it is being undermined by these measures.”

Source:
http://rare.us/story/putin-sends-in-the-trolls/#sthash.ORbWczWk.dpuf
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/03/news/russia-troll-factory-putin/

One year after 298 civilians fell to earth over eastern Ukraine, Putin’s regime is still denying culpability. Here’s definitive evidence to the contrary.

It’s been more than a year since Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot out of the sky, killing all 298 civilians onboard. The results of the official inquiry have yet to be released, and while the fact that this Boeing 777 was immolated has not been disputed, various theories have been floated by the Russian government, and other interested parties as to how it was and who ultimately bears responsibility for this tragedy.

The last year has seen Moscow lie, fabricate, and insult the intelligence of all thinking people by tossing up self-evidently absurd “explanations” for how almost 300 innocents met their end. The Kremlin has also conducted a concerted smear campaign against journalists and investigators trying to unearth the truth in every damning detail. Most recently, President Vladimir Putin has rejected a Dutch attempt to convene an international tribunal seeking to find out who was responsible for the MH17 tragedy, saying it would be “counterproductive.” In short, in trying to hide its culpability for a horrific accident, the Kremlin has disparaged the memory of the victims and mocked the suffering of their survivors. It has therefore compounded a crime of sheer negligence with the greater one of obstruction of justice.

A Buk surface-to-air missile downed flight MH17, Dutch investigators have said as they unveiled a reconstruction of the plane that showed huge shrapnel damage to the cockpit and front section. Tjibbe Joustra, the chairman of the Dutch safety board, said the Malaysia Airlines plane was hit on 17 July 2014, as it flew at 33,000ft (10,000 metres) above eastern Ukraine. MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian-made Buk 9M38M1 anti-aircraft missile from separatist-held territory on July 17, 2014, the warhead was fitted to a “9M28 missile” fired from a Russian-built Buk missile system, Dutch Safety Board chairman Tjibbe Joustra told reporters on Oct. 13.

The vast majority of the evidence adds credibility to the theory that an anti-aircraft Buk missile launcher, controlled by either Russian soldiers or Russian-backed fighters and fired from a field south of the town of Snezhnoye, destroyed the commercial airliner. The Buk is an advanced weapons system capable of destroying military aircraft or even ballistic missiles at an altitude up to 82,000 feet, and so its presence on Ukraine’ battlefield was always set to change both the scope and intensity of the conflict. But it suspiciously arrived in the arsenal of the Russian-backed fighters at a time when the Ukrainian military was making rapid gains and was perhaps closing in on a military solution to the conflict.

Before MH17

After Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014, bands of pro-Russian fighters began to seize police stations, government buildings, and other strategic areas across eastern Ukraine. Even at that time there was evidence that these raids were organized or led by men who were associated with or members of the Russian military. Initially, the Ukrainian military, left in serious disrepair by the ousted Yanukovych government, was hesitant to respond to this threat. It’s likely that the Ukrainian interim government was initially concerned about a possible counter-revolution launched by disloyal members of the police, military, and security apparatus. Whatever the cause, the “separatists” began to take control of large parts of eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military began its “Anti-Terror Operation,” or ATO, in April to reclaim territory that had been seized by the pro-Russian insurgents, many of whom were operating under the command of Russian citizens (and probably Russian soldiers) who arrived to fight against the new government in Kiev. On June 7, Ukraine elected its first post-revolution president, Petro Poroshenko, who won partially as a result of his pledge to restore order quickly to eastern Ukraine. The ATO had already started to gain momentum throughout May but, perhaps feeling that it had survived the aftermath of a sometimes violent revolution and now had a public mandate to act, the Poroshenko government mobilized the military to confront the separatist threat even more forcefully.

And for a while, it worked. By early July, the Russian-backed fighters had begun to lose considerable ground, including the key coastal city of Mariupol. On July 5, the Ukrainian military regained control of Slavyansk and nearby Kramatorsk, two major separatist bases. The next day Ukraine regained control of Artemivsk; by July 7 the majority of separatists in the northwestern area of their control zone had retreated to the city of Donetsk, their de facto “capital,” which was also soon besieged by the ATO.

If the rate of Ukrainian victories continued unabated, the Ukrainian military would soon be in a position to isolate the separatists from Russia, which Kiev had maintained from outset was supplying them with fighters and materiel. In less than a month the ATO had drastically shrunk the size of the self-proclaimed “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk, and were creeping up on the command centers of both.

Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters

These battlefield victories are crucial to understanding the context of the MH17 tragedy because all available evidence suggests that this is the exact period in which Moscow increased its direct support for its proxies in the area. By late August, the momentum of this war had quickly turned, the ATO was rapidly losing territory, and Kiev and Western governments declared that this was only made possible because of a massive influx of Russian military hardware—and conventional Russian soldiers. Indeed, the “Russian invasion” of eastern Ukraine became an established fact as of August 2014.

Among the weapons 'imported' from Russia to terrorists in the Eastern Ukraine in this period were advanced anti-aircraft systems including the Strela-10, Pantir-S1, and the Buk.

The Anti-Aircraft War

In November 2014, the weapons and munitions experts from Armament Research Services published the most comprehensive catalog of weapons used in this conflict to date. In the report, they note that advanced anti-aircraft systems like the Strela-10 (9k35) and 9k33 Osa were first seen in this conflict in early July. The influx of advanced anti-aircraft systems during this period corresponded to a growing number of Ukrainian aircraft that were shot down in combat.

Curiously, while most of the separatist weapons were supposedly captured from the Ukrainian military, these weapons showed up on Ukraine’ battlefields at a time when the Russian-backed fighters were on the defensive. So where were they captured from?

It was reportedly filmed on July 2, 2014. In that video, the Strela-10 is seen traveling on a road that is well-known to Ukraine researchers because the Buk missile launcher was seen traveling on it after MH17 was blown up 15 days later, but in the opposite direction and minus one missile.

The rate at which Kiev lost aircraft escalated quickly. According to ARES, from late April to early May, five Ukrainian helicopters were shot down near Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. However, soon the separatists began targeting Ukrainian military planes. On June 6 the Russian-backed fighters shot down their first fixed-wing aircraft, an Antonov An-30 surveillance craft northeast of Slavyansk, near Drobyshevo. On June 14, a Ukrainian Ilyushin Il-76 strategic airliner was shot down over Lugansk.

One month later, on July 14—three days before MH17’s immolation—a Ukrainian Antonov An-26 was downed over the Izvarino border crossing. Remarkably, Russian media reported that this aircraft was shot down by a Buk that had been captured weeks earlier from the Ukrainian military.

Our team at The Interpreter reported on the claim that separatists had captured a Buk, and pointed out that this story only ran on TV Zvezda, a network run by the Russian Defense Ministry. No other sources appeared to carry this newsworthy information except for a curious tweet from the Twitter fan account for Natalya Poklonskaya, the pro-Moscow Crimean prosecutor who became a celebrity after Russia’s Anschluss of the peninsula, saying the separatists had received some “cookies” in the form of the Buk. Was it possible, therefore, that TV Zvezda was already creating a cover story to explain how the Russian proxies managed acquire such a recherché Russian weapon?

On July 16, two new milestones were reached in what can feasibly be called the Ukraine-Russian War. First, a Ukrainian Sukhoi SU-25M1 close air support jet fighter was shot down over the border. In that incident, the spokesperson for the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council claimed that an air-to-air missile fired by one of Russia’s jets was likely responsible.

Second, The Interpreter was able to definitively document through geolocated YouTube videos that a group of Grad rocket launchers positioned on the Russian side of the border were firing into Ukrainian territory.

The Day Of On the morning of July 17, news surfaced that another plane, possibly a Ukrainian military cargo plane, had been shot down near Torez. Citizens and reporters near the crash site had already begun to post pictures and videos of the smoking debris. We now know that the only plane that crashed in this area was a civilian airliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

The separatists, it seems, were also confused. A social media page associated with the then-military leader of the Russian-backed fighters, Colonel Igor Strelkov (aka Igor Girkin), took credit for the shooting down of an aircraft near Torez. At 17:50 Moscow time—approximately 30 minutes after the aircraft was struck but well before most of the world was aware that a civilian airliner had vanished from the sky—a group on the Russian social-networking site VKontakte called Strelkov’s Dispatches posted the boast of the downing of the plane (with some of the same videos The Interpreter had already posted, used as corroborating evidence), adding: “We warned them—don’t fly ‘in our sky.’”

When the darker truth was eventually discovered, the post was deleted, although we had already captured screenshots. Titled “Report from the Militia,” it had in fact been copied from another forum where Strelkov was the moderator, called Antikvariat.ru, at 17:37 Moscow time.

While Strelkov’s Dispatches has been challenged as “inauthentic,” in fact it was used by Strelkov and other separatist leaders before July 17 and since to post official information about the war. It’s also been cited by Russian state media on several occasions and has never been disavowed by Strelkov personally. He continues to allow the group to use his name and likeness, despite the renaming of the VKontakte group the “Novorossiya Militia Dispatches.”

More revealing, the Russian media, including ITAR-TASS, RIA Novosti, and Vzglyad.ru, cited this forum and other sources that claimed the separatists had shot down a Ukrainian cargo plane—until, of course, it was learned that the crashed plane was a civilian airliner.

But Vzglyad.ru added another important detail:
“Ukrainian military claim that the losses were caused by actions by Russia. The militia refuted this information, correcting that they had shot down the plane from a ZRK ‘9K37M1’ (better known as a Buk).”

In Putin.War, Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov’s posthumously published report on Moscow’s military involvement in Ukraine, he points out that Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, tried to excuse the fact that the separatists claimed responsibility for the attack thus:

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty
“People from the east [of Ukraine] said that they had shot down a military plane. If they believed that they had shot down a military plane, it was confusion. If it was confusion, then it was not an act of terrorism.” In other words, a high-ranking Russian diplomat was trying to account for why separatists shot down MH17—a disclosure that, as we shall see, was ignored and then vehemently rejected by Churkin’s superiors.

The Missile

One problem was immediately apparent after MH17 was reduced to a scattered pile of wreckage. Details began to emerge about the altitude it was traveling at before it fell from the sky—33,000 feet.

Each anti-aircraft missile has a rating for how far away and how high it can hit a target. This relatively high altitude ruled out multiple missile systems that had so far been documented on the battlefield in Ukraine. But Associated Press journalist Peter Leonard reported after the incident that one of his reporters saw a Buk missile system moving through the town of Snezhnoye.

The Buk is capable of hitting targets more than twice as high as MH17 was traveling. Furthermore, as The Interpreter’s original report on the incident catalogs, multiple pictures, videos, and eyewitness reports have emerged that place the Buk missile launcher in several of the surrounding towns. A significant amount of evidence puts the Buk clearly within range of MH17 when the aircraft was hit.

The Incriminating Tweet

In the hours that followed the announcement that a civilian airliner, not a military cargo jet, had been destroyed, the Russian-backed separatists took several steps to hide some of their previous statements. As we noted above, the claim by “Strelkov’s Dispatches” that the pro-Russian fighters had shot down a Ukrainian plane with a Buk was removed. But it was not the only incriminating Internet post that was removed.

On June 29, the official Twitter account of the press office for the Donetsk People’s Republic had tweeted a picture of a Buk missile system that they said their troops were now controlling (the origin of the missile is left unclear in the language of the tweet). This tweet, too, got deleted, and when Time magazine reporter Simon Shuster later queried the separatist leadership about whether they ever possessed a Buk, they said they didn’t.

Separatists were perhaps too eager to claim that they, and not the Russian military, were responsible for the downing of what they assumed was another Ukrainian military plane—a media strategy that quickly backfired once it became clear that a commercial jet was hit.

In an interview with the radio station Echo of Moscow, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of the well-respected independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, said Alexander Boroday, the self-appointed head of the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic,” told Russian journalists that his troops shot down MH17. Muratov was vague about his sources for the story, suggesting that they were reporters for other news agencies. Muratov told the radio station: “I know that Alexander Boroday called the head of one of the main media organizations that covers events in Ukraine approximately 40 minutes after the Boeing perished and said, ‘Likely we shot down a civilian airline.’ I was told this and people talked about this whose words I am accustomed to taking seriously.”

Ukraine’s Intercepts

Eyewitness and journalist accounts placed a Buk near MH17 on July 17, and the Russian media and the separatists themselves acknowledged, in multiple outlets, that they shot down an aircraft—with a Buk. Notably, the Ukrainian government was also quick to adopt this narrative.

Only hours after the plane crashed, Kiev released what it said was a leaked audio recording, reportedly an intercepted phone call, reportedly between Igor Bezler (Bes, or “Demon”), a commander of the Russian-backed fighters, and Vasily Geranin, who is described as a colonel in the Russian Federation’s GRU (military intelligence). In that conversation, the two men confirm that “a plane has just been shot down” outside Enakievo, a town 62 miles northwest of Snezhnoye, by one of the separatist militias. After this, two men who are identified as “Major” and “Geek,” presumably two of the fighters, sound shocked as they learn that the plane was filled with civilians.

In a separate release by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) later in the day, another separatist leader, Mykola Kozitsin, reportedly has a conversation with one of his fighters in which he is audibly unnerved that a civilian airliner, not a Ukrainian cargo plane, that was shot down. “What the fuck were they flying in here for? There’s a war on,” a frustrated Kozitsin told the man on the other end of the line.

The next day, the SBU released another allegedly intercepted conversation, this time between a separatist commander and a GRU officer who goes by the callsign “Oreon.” In this exchange, which can be read in English here, the separatist commander says: “We already have the Buk and we will shoot them [Ukrainian military planes] down.” Oreon replies: “Yes, I know that.”

In the same release, a separate conversation between two separatist commanders can be heard in which the fighters admit that they have “received” a Buk anti-aircraft system and that it came “through the stripe”—code for the security cordon on the border between Russia and Ukraine.

On July 25, eight days after the downing of MH17, the SBU released a fourth audio tape that it claimed was recorded just two minutes prior to the Boeing’s being hit. A man the SBU identifies as Igor Bezler speaks to a man called Naymanets (“hired hand” in Russian). Naymanets tells Bezler that a “birdie” is flying in his direction.

Bezler: “A ‘birdie’ has flown to us?”
Naymanets: “Yes, one, for now.”
Bezler: “A scout or a big one?”
Naymanets: “It's not visible behind the clouds. It’s really high.” [Emphasis added.]
Bezler: “That it’s—I understand. Got it.”
Naymanets: “Uh-huh.”
Bezler: “Announce up top [‘report up the chain].”

The Russian government and the Russian-backed separatists have denied the authenticity of the tapes. Can they be authenticated?

The first clue that the tapes were real came from the speed with which they were released and the integrity of the details and narratives on them. The first two tapes were disclosed soon after MH17 was shot down; a third was released the next day, as the world struggled to piece together what had just happened and how. The tapes conform exactly to the narrative put forth by the Ukrainian government and are supported by a large body of empirical evidence.

But the most important confirmation of the tapes’ authenticity comes from none other than the separatists themselves.

Soon after the first audio leaks were released, and perhaps in a hurry to deny responsibility for an incident that had killed so many innocent civilians, Igor Bezler released a statement in which he admitted that it was indeed his voice on the recording with Geranin. But that conversation, Bezler insisted, happened before July 17, when a different plane was shot down. Bezler accused the SBU of editing the recording to make it sound like he was referring to MH17.

So Bezler confirms the authenticity of the conversation but denies its context. Yet in his confirmation is an important revelation: In his phone call with Geranin he describes a plane traveling over Enakievo, a town MH17 passed over before it was struck above Snezhnoye. This plane is described as flying at a high altitude (as was the one discussed between Bezler and Naymanets in the other intercepted conversation).

And yet according to the ARES analysis of all downed Ukrainian military aircraft until November 2014, no plane or helicopter was hit anywhere near Enakievo before July 17. (A MiG-29 fighter jet was downed close to the town on August 7.) Bezler cannot have been right in claiming that his conversation with Geranin occurred before MH17 was blown up.

Members of a group of international experts inspect wreckage at the site where the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed, near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo) in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine August 1, 2014. International experts started recovery work at the wreckage site of the downed Malaysian airliner in east Ukraine on Friday despite clashes nearby between government forces and pro-Russian rebels.

Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Buk at the Scene of the Crime

Before we consider some of the more technical aspects of this incident, it’s worth considering a more basic fact. Before July 17, several anti-aircraft missiles were documented as being in the possession of the Russian-backed fighters. The earliest examples of these are shoulder-launched MANPADS, which are more than capable of shooting down low-flying aircraft such as helicopters. Some of the newest additions, as explained above, were vehicle-based systems like the Osa and the Strela-10. These weapons are far more advanced, capable of downing helicopters but really designed to shoot down faster-moving aircraft like ground-attack jets. The presence of these weapons could explain the destruction of some of the Ukrainian aircraft that were shot down earlier in July. But none of these weapons is capable of shooting down an aircraft flying as high as MH17 was on that fateful day.

The only weapon in the area capable of shooting down MH17 and spotted by journalists, dozens of eyewitnesses, and many videos and pictures taken by citizen journalists was the Buk.

Proof that at least one Buk missile launcher in Russian-backed terrorists possesion was within range of MH17 when the aircraft was shot down:
■     Journalists from the Associated Press saw a Buk missile launcher in Snezhnoye before MH17 was shot down.
■     In a detailed report, Roman Bochkala, a journalist for TV Inter in Ukraine, wrote that he witnessed the Russian-backed separatists in possession of a Buk missile system, driving in a convoy from Torez toward Snezhnoye.
■     A geolocated video posted on July 17, the day of the incident, shows a Buk missile launcher in the center of Snezhnoye, driving south.
■     The Guardian interviewed residents of Torez who positively identified the Buk missile launcher and said it traveled in a convoy toward Snezhnoye.
■     A geolocated picture shows a Buk launcher in Torez, moving in the direction of Snezhnoye. BuzzFeed journalists later visited Torez, confirmed the details of the picture, and spoke to residents who saw the Buk travel through the town toward Snezhnoye.
■     Journalists from Novaya Gazeta traveled to the area around the crash site and interviewed witnesses to the MH17 disaster. One resident of Grabovo, where MH17 actually crashed, claims a “‘ball’ flew at high speed from the southeast [from the direction of Snezhnoye]” and disappeared behind the clouds before an explosion was heard. Novaya Gazeta also interviewed citizens of Pervomaiskoye, just south of Snezhnoye, where some suspect the Buk actually fired the missile. The reports of these citizens—many of whom were afraid to talk for fear of repercussions from the separatists who still control the area—are confused and somewhat contradictory (more on this in a minute), but they all seem to agree that a projectile or projectiles fired from the ground shot down the aircraft.

There is also a clear pattern to the data. Before the missile launch, multiple eyewitnesses, journalists, pictures, and videos describe the Buk as moving from Torez toward Snezhnoye, and from there south toward Pervomaiskoye. We also see that some eyewitnesses described the missiles as flying from somewhere south of Snezhnoye. This theory is backed up by open-sourced forensics and investigations launched by journalists.

Photograph from Paris Match of the Buk missile launcher in Donetsk, Ukraine, July 17, 2014.

Photograph from Paris Match of the Buk missile launcher in Donetsk, Ukraine, July 17, 2014.

Screenshot from footage filmed in Zuhres, Ukraine, July 17, 2014.

Photograph from Torez, Ukraine, July 17, 2014.

A further clue about the launch site of the Buk was furnished by an obscure picture released by the Ukrainian government on July 18. Revealed later to have been taken by a Torez photographer from his roof, the image allegedly shows a smoke trail created by the missile as it traveled toward MH17.

The Ukraine at War blog was able to use landmarks in that picture to estimate where the picture was taken. The launch site, then, was somewhere south of Snezhnoye and west of Pervomaiskoye, just as was indicated by some of the eyewitnesses.

BuzzFeed’s Max Seddon confirmed where that picture was taken, from a vantage point looking toward the field in question. The Telegraph’s Roland Oliphant visited that field and found scorch marks on the ground, likely the backfire from a missile launcher, as well as other debris that suggests that Russian-backed separatists were operating there. Those reports match interviews conducted by The Guardian’s Shaun Walker and others.

Ukraine at War then pinpointed the location of the possible launch site and compared satellite images taken three days after the incident with images taken before it to confirm that unusual tracks were visible in the fields, as if a tracked vehicle—perhaps a Buk—had traveled through the fields.

In December 2014, Dutch photographer Olaf Koens found the man who took the photo, and several others that were never published. Soon after, so did Russian blogger Sergei Parkhomenko, whose report was republished by Putin.War, the Nemtsov report. According to the photographer, he heard a loud missile launch, much louder than anything he had heard before, snapped a picture of the smoke trails, and then noticed the black smoke rising from the opposite direction, from Grabovo—the area where what was left of MH17 eventually crashed. This description matches exactly multiple other reports of the incident pieced together by various sources.

On on July 17, 2014 a Buk missile launcher, originating from the 53rd Brigade near Kursk, Russia, travelled from Donetsk to Snizhne. It was then unloaded and drove under its own power to a field south of Snizhne, where at approximately 4:20 pm it launched a surface-to-air missile that hit Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew over Ukraine. On the morning of July 18, the Buk missile launcher was driven from Luhansk, Ukraine, across the border to Russia.

EXACT location pinpointed of MH17 missile launch site

Journalist Roland Oliphant read my blog where I calculated the possible site of the missile launch. See the blog.

This is how that looked like:

The Story Told by Debris

Investigators have access to an even more definitive forensic body of evidence—the debris field from the aircraft.

The Buk has a very different signature than many other types of missiles. Infrared tracking missiles, like the Strela-10, fire a missile that is attracted to the heat-generating engines and explodes on contract. Similarly, infrared homing air-to-air missiles fired by aircraft also target the engines.

Not so with the Buk, which uses radar-proximity missiles. These missiles travel toward the target and then explode when they get within adequate range. The explosions send fragmentation into the targeted aircraft, often ripping it apart. A defense analyst with IHS Jane’s noted that the pattern of damage seen on the fuselage of the plane was consistent with the theory that a Buk surface-to-air missile was used. A ballistics expert and lecturer at ANU Strategic Defence Studies Centre, Stephan Fruhling, agreed, noting that the damage was consistent with a fragmentation device such as a Buk, not a weapon such as an air-to-air missile, which targets the engines and does not send fragmentation rounds into the aircraft. A spokesperson for the SBU noted that some of the bodies of the victims of MH17 contained metal fragments not consistent with the aircraft itself. A journalist for Dutch broadcaster RTLNieuws discovered a fragment at the crash site that arms experts say is part of the explosive charge of a Buk missile.

Indeed, the Russian state-operated manufacturer of the Buk, Almaz-Antey, claims that a Buk was responsible for the shooting down of MH17, although it claims the missile was fired from Ukrainian government-held territory (a theory we will examine in a moment).

Perhaps most critically, the Dutch Safety Board’s initial investigation stated that the aircraft was “penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects” which “originated from outside the fuselage,” a description consistent with a Buk. This week sources working with the official Dutch investigation conducted by the Dutch Safety Board told CNN that their official findings will definitively say that a Russian Buk, fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed fighters, shot down MH17.

Russian Disinformation

There have been two alternative theories put forth by the Russian government. The first is that a Ukrainian Su-25 fired an air-to-air missile at MH17 and the second that a Buk fired from ATO-monitored terrain shot down the airliner.

The Su-25 theory was put forth by the Russian government four days after the grim event (but after significant, often contradictory, and widely conspiratorial speculation by the Russian state-owned media). It was immediately dismissed by experts who pointed out that the Su-25 is not capable of flying the flight plan described by the Russian government nor, in all likelihood, was it capable of shooting down a plane flying at over 33,000 feet. Furthermore, the Dutch Safety Board’s initial finding was that the missile which shot down MH17 exploded “from above the level of the cockpit floor,” not at the engines or below the aircraft, which is what we would expect to see from missiles fired by a Su-25. As the investigative bloggers at the citizen journalist website Bellingcat noted the problems with this theory are legion.

Even the Russian government seemed to abandon this line of thinking quickly. Engineers for the Russian manufacturer of the Buk missile claimed that, yes, the airliner was shot down by a Buk, but the specific missile in question is not used by Russia, and the missile that was used was not fired from near Snezhnoye, but rather from Zaroshchenskoye, territory controlled by the Ukrainian government.
All of these points were debunked.

The first problem with the engineer’s report: Even the separatists claimed at the time that Zaroshchenskoye was controlled by the Russian-backed fighters, not the Ukrainian military.

The second problem: Novaya Gazeta’s Pavel Kanygin went to both Zaroshchenskoye and the area around the MH17 crash site. While those near the crash site gave contradictory and somewhat confusing statements, they did see a surface-to-air missile fired at MH17, while no one interviewed in Zaroshchenskoye saw either the Ukrainian military nor a Buk missile launcher.

The third problem: The missile in question is used by the Russian military, and multiple missiles of this variety were documented in convoys moving on the Russian side of the border close to Ukraine.

The core absurdity with Moscow’s alternative theories—conspiracy theories, really—is even more basic. The Ukrainian government, citing intelligence sources, swiftly put forth a narrative whereby a Buk missile launcher was transported from the Russian border to the area where MH17 was downed; then the missile was fired and destroyed the civilian airliner before the launcher was evacuated back across the Russian border.

The Ukrainian narrative has been consistent from the start, and although Kiev made at least one mistake in its initial press release, a significant body of subsequent evidence supports this narrative. The Kremlin narrative, on the other hand, has been ever-changing, woefully substantiated, and largely contradictory—and many of the various theories put forth by its surrogates in the state-controlled media have been risible.
Who’s to Blame?

How did the separatists get a Buk anti-aircraft missile? Did they capture one from the Ukrainian military, or were they given a Buk by the Russian government? Is it even possible that Russian soldiers pulled the trigger?

The first key to answering this question is to track the movement of the Buk on the morning on July 17, 2014. In The Interpreter’s first comprehensive report on this issue we published a timeline of events that combines our own work with a timeline posted by the Associated Press, which also includes claims from the Ukrainian intelligence assessment. An updated version is below:
■     01:05—Buk enters Ukraine on flatbed truck. (AP—Ukrainian counterterrorism chief Vitaly Nayda)
■     09:00—Buk reaches Donetsk, disembarks flatbed truck. (AP—Ukrainian counterterrorism chief Vitaly Nayda). A picture of the Buk was taken that places it in Donetsk at approximately 11 a.m. (read more on this here.)
■     Approximately 11:40—Picture places Buk in Zuhres, between Donetsk and Torez. (Bellingcat)
■     Approximately 12:00 to 13:00—Social media posts place Buk in Torez, then moving toward Snezhnoye. (Bellingcat)
■     Approximately lunchtime—Buk reaches Karapetyan Street in Snezhnoye. (AP—eyewitnesses)
■     13:05—AP journalists see Buk moving through Snezhnoye in convoy with two civilian cars. This was reported by AP before MH17 was shot down. (AP)
■     16:18—Intercepted audio released by Ukrainian SBU has separatist commander Igor Bezler speaking, told by rebel spotter that a “birdie” flying “really high” was moving into range. (The Interpreter)
■     16:20—Locals in Snezhnoye report one or two loud blasts. One minute to a minute and a half later, a second blast is heard. MH17 falls from the sky after this. (AP)
■     16:33—Intercepted phone call has separatists realizing that they shot down a civilian airliner, not a military transport plane. (The Interpreter)
■     16:40—An intercepted phone call has Bezler speaking to Vasily Geranin, who is described as a colonel in the Russian Federation’s GRU, indicating that an aircraft has been shot down. There is a discrepancy with the time stamp since only one aircraft was shot down in this area. Bezler says it was “30 minutes ago,” but it was really only 20 minutes earlier. (The Interpreter)
■     16:50—The VKontakte community “Strelkov’s Dispatches” posts a report “from the militia” about the downing of “an AN-26″ in the “region of Torez.” (The Interpreter)
■     17:14-17:42—Separatists see that the wreckage of the what they shot down is indeed a civilian aircraft, not a military one. The “Mayor” admits that they have shot down a “a super big civilian craft,” and a separatist reports “fragments right in the yards” and “civilian stuff, medicine, toilet paper, towels.”
■     17:18—Pro-Kremlin outlet Vzglyad.ru reports separatists taking credit for downing “an AN-26” (actually MH17) with a Buk; admissions of possession of Buks also covered on July 14. (The Interpreter)
■     Approximately 20:00-21:00—Video released by the Ukrainian government shows a Buk, missing one missile, in Lugansk on the road to Krasnodon, which leads to a key border crossing, likely approximately at sunset.
■     02:00-04:00 on July 18—The Buk launchers reportedly cross the border into Russia. (Ukrainian government)

Even more evidence has come to light since that fleshes out the Buk’s travels before and after MH17 was shot down. The investigative bloggers at Bellingcat were able to analyze a photograph, originally published by Paris Match, which places the Buk in Donetsk at approximately 11 a.m on July 17. The numbering on the side of the Buk in that picture, 3x2, with the “x” being a missing number, matches precisely a video of a Buk located in Stary Oskol, Russia, on June 23. Other investigations by Bellingcat suggest that the vehicles in the June 23 convoy were part of Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade.

There is another far more basic reason to believe that the Russian military either directly controlled the missile that shot down MH17 or helped the separatists conduct the attack: the sheer complexity of the weapon, which mere “volunteers” could not operate by themselves. (See The Aviationist for a brief view of how complex the controls for this weapons system are.)

Evidence Still Emerging

Though MH17 was destroyed one year ago laast Friday, even more new evidence is coming to light. News Corp Australia has just released a new video that shows the Russian-backed fighters arriving at the scene of the crash site. In the video, the voice of a rebel commander can be heard issuing orders and communicating with other Russian-backed fighters by both radio and phone. He arrives at the scene expecting to find the remains of a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet that he seems to believe his troops have just shot down. Instead, he finds nothing but a civilian airliner.

News Corp also says that their investigation has unearthed evidence that the locals on the ground were being instructed to say that a Ukrainian jet shot down the civilian airliner.

The video is disturbing. Russian-backed fighters rummage through the luggage of the recently deceased in search for the aircraft’s black boxes and other identifiable paperwork and USB sticks. The commander continues to repeat that “they [the Ukrainians] brought down the passenger plane [with a fighter jet] and we brought down the fighter.” The problem—there is no fighter. This commander's troops have just shot down a civilian aircraft, a fact that begins to dawn on them over the course of the 17-minute video.

The commander can be heard off camera saying: “They say the Sukhoi [fighter] brought down the civilian plane and ours brought down the fighter…But where is the Sukhoi? There it is…it’s the passenger plane.”

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/17/how-we-know-russia-shot-down-mh17.html

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Russia's FSB colonel Igor Strelkov openly stated: "I Am Responsible for War in Eastern Ukraine". “I was the one who pressed the trigger of that war. If our unit had not crossed the border, it would have all ended as it did in Kharkiv or Odesa. Several dozen casualties, those with burns and those arrested. And that would have been the end of it… It was practically our unit, which got this ongoing war moving.”

In April 2014, Strelkov, joined by armed irregulars from Russia, marched from Crimea to the provincial city of Sloviansk, which is strategically located between the population centers of Donetsk and Kharkiv. "In the beginning, nobody there wanted to fight," Strelkov recalls. He and his men attacked a police station in Sloviansk and created facts on the ground. Later, he became the so-called defense minister of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic.

The essence of the interview is a confessionary statement by Girkin-Strelkov claiming that nowar in East and South Ukraine would have taken place without the involvement of terrorists sent from Russia, and in particular, the group that he commanded. A close translation of his statement reads: “I was the one who pressed the trigger of that war. If our unit had not crossed the border, it would have all ended as it did in Kharkiv or Odesa. Several dozen casualties, those with burns and those arrested. And that would have been the end of it… It was practically our unit, which got this ongoing war moving.”

Regarding the local population, which, according to the Russian propaganda, “stood up to protect the Russian world against the Ukrainian fascists,” the Girkin-Strelkov’s story of this goes as follows: “No-one wanted to make war at first… but in April and May [of 2014] everything was building up, and the rebellion area was expanding. We (!) were gradually taking control of populated areas of the Donetsk Republic.”

The “we” pronoun that Girkin uses to refer to the group of Russian terrorists under his own command means a lot in this case. It was precisely “them,” the Russian mercenaries, who “took control of” the Donbas.

According to the “DNR’s Minister for Defense,” this is what was going on in Donetsk before Girkin’s mercenaries marched in: “When we came into Donetsk, everything was just fine there. There was a mayor from Kyiv, the Department of Internal Affairs was still under Kyiv’s command… Donetsk was a totally peaceful city at that time. People were sunbathing on the beaches, sportsmen working out, drinking coffee at the cafe’s. Donetsk looked just like Moscow in summer… My soldiers were eager to seize and disperse all these civilians in the rear.”

Further important evidence from Girkin relates to the crucial role of the Russian troops, referred to in the interview as “vacationers.” It is obvious they are serving Russian military personnel, and not ex-members of the armed forces or security services, who Girkin clearly distinguishes from his own army which is composed of the “vacationers” and local militia. The phrases “managed to hold on till the “vacationers” came” and “Mariupol was mainly attacked by the ‘vacationers’” and similar indicate that the former “DNR’s Minister for Defense” openly acknowledges that the main forces that are against Ukraine in Donetsk and Luhansk are the serving troops of the Russian army disguised under the name of “vacationers.”

Girkin’s statements about his constantly receiving “commands” and “instructions,” which he attempted to strictly follow, are also of importance. Girkin refutes entirely the propaganda voice on air at the federal level that the initial objective of the whole “Novorossiya” project was to set up an independent state when he says, “First I expected the Crimean scenario – that Russia was going to take over. That was the best option. And the local population was hoping for it. No one cared to fight for the Luhansk or the Donetsk Republics.”

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THE KREMLIN MARK ON THE "GAY-PARADE" IN KYIV.
Leader of the pro-russian forces in the Eastern Ukraine claimed that he killed 15 prisoners of war.
20 questions for those who support Putin’s aggression in the Eastern Ukraine
Kremlin troll army. Russian web of lies.
How We Know That Kremlin-Backed Separatists Shot Down MH17 In The Eastern Ukraine.
No war in East and South Ukraine would have taken place without Russian-backed terrorists.

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Entries tagged with #ukraine

THE KREMLIN MARK ON THE "GAY-PARADE" IN KYIV.

Leader of the pro-russian forces in the Eastern Ukraine claimed that he killed 15 prisoners of war.

20 questions for those who support Putin’s aggression in the Eastern Ukraine

Kremlin troll army. Russian web of lies.

How We Know That Kremlin-Backed Separatists Shot Down MH17 In The Eastern Ukraine.

No war in East and South Ukraine would have taken place without Russian-backed terrorists.