What the hell is happening? No news in under two months. The last thing I remember hearing about it was the Russians had stolen the black box (not very effing suspicious eh Putin?) and were refusing to hand it over (probably to tamper with it). They shot down a plane and continue to attack Ukraine despite their ceasefire... I mean seriously, the "sanctions" they're getting is akin to spanking a small child, it's not a real punishment to them.
Pretty sure the black boxes, (both) are in the hands of the Dutch, some bodies remain unrecovered and the war activity is preventing further recovery. The plane exploded mid air, there's clear evidence of a missile (an explosion took place outside the aircraft).
One of the bodies was a local lad, a loyal Geordie. His family have became something like local celebrities.
It's ... not infamy. The city has essentially come together to help the family, especially with leaving flower tributes to him in St. James's Park, the Newcastle United football stadium. It's been quite heartwarming to see people coming together to help a family in mourning out.
Initial reports of it all being Russian fault remain unsubstantiated. My take on this is, if Western media can't blame the Russians, the logical answer offers itself - what if it was West-supported fascists in the Ukrainian Parliament (the self-declared fascist party Svoboda who are in power now)? Better not dwell on that until we can blame Russians for sure. If we can blame them at all. I have no idea who shot the plane down. It could have been the Ukrainians engineering a catastrophe to make NATO get involved, I would not put it past them. Or it could have been the Russians. or it could have been an accident, it is a war zone after all, the plane shouldn't have been flying over the Ukraine in these circumstances anyway. I hope the case is cleared ip, for the sake of all the grieving families. Such a senseless tragedy.
That's quite the conspiracy theory there @jazzabel. Honestly, while there are plenty of lies and distortions about who bombed who and what the death counts are, there is not a big secret this was done by some Ukrainian rebels with Russian supplied missiles that probably thought they were shooting down another Ukrainian government aircraft. Nothing else makes a lick of logical sense.
It's the most logical explanation, but logic doesn't go very far in war zones. The only people who actually had an incentive to do it were the Ukrainian leaders, and both sides have access to the same weapons, so there's no way to prove it one way or another unless some whistleblower comes forward. My guess is that we'll never know for sure. Or, at least, not for many years to come.
I've given the incentive for the rebels, they mistook the aircraft for a Ukrainian government aircraft. What incentive do you imagine the Ukrainian government had? As for the evidence, US satellites recorded where the missile was launched from, and the rebels had shot down a government aircraft a few days before. You can imagine the US is making that up since we know they do carry out propaganda campaigns. But the US had nothing to gain. They didn't need Putin or the rebels to be any more disliked. Unlike the evidence of Assad using poison gas on populations in Syria, the loss of flight MH17 was no game changer for anyone except the victims and their families.
Presumably to drum up support in the international community. They don't actually need any support, the world is pretty much against Russia. The desire to join the EU is what brought about their revolution in the first place, so they don't really need support of the Ukrainian people. And we have to ask, "Why not bring down a flight from a nation that would actually retaliate?" Air France, or UA or someone that would bring the heat.
It's pretty obvious to everyone with a working brain cell that the rebels shot this plane down, mistaking it for a military aircraft. It seems whatever goal they had in mind, though, has failed. All it's done is killed innocent people.
Well keep in mind that some people here are going off of news sources that replaced Pravda. The Russian state controls all Russian media, so anyone who gets their news from Russian TV channels is just getting straight propaganda.
RT (Russian Times, I think) reported that they found a man dead with a air mask strapped on his face. Of course, no other news source that I saw reported anything this significant. So how I see it is: Russia (or Russian backed Ukrainian Rebels) shoots the plane down. Vladmir Putin was in a plane that crossed the same spot hours before at a similar altitude. So Russia shoots it down and blames Ukrainian Nationalists, screaming, "They tried to kill President Putin!" to stir up patriotism and anti-Ukrainian feelings. But everyone knows that it was Russia or the Ukrainian Rebels, so now they say they've found someone who had a gas mask on. "Well, a missile would have killed everyone instantly! This man had time to put his mask on, it must have been a crash..." But that's what I think. Ukrainian Nationalists have enough on their hands, they wouldn't shoot down a plane flying above the war zone (The plane was at 32,000 feet while the war zone ends at 30,000 feet so it was a civilian plane in free airspace).
But there is a difference between news as a commodity, (in this case they would be susceptible to false information fed to them by the US government) and Pravda which is more directly controlled by the Russian government. Nothing prevents our news media from discussing alternative sources of information that differ from the government feed. Now that's not to say the corporate control of the Western media does not have it's own filters and agendas. We saw that when the news media bought GW Bush's Iraq war hook, line, and sinker. Bottom line, besides Pravda, are there any independent news sources claiming evidence the Ukrainian government launched the missile? And what was their motive given they didn't need to drum up support? And it gets further fetched to say the government did it and the US government is in on the conspiracy because they would need to be in order to say they had evidence of where the missile was launched from.
I think this is essentially right. And also, the place this crash - whatever it was that happened, makes no sense if you think the Ukrainian government shot it down. The plane was leaving Ukrainian air-space, within not many miles (when you count it in the 100s of miles planes go at) it would be in Russian airspace and then there would be absolutely nothing the Ukrainian government could really say. The plane was also flying over rebel-held territory - one thing Ukraine does not want to do is basically allow Russia to do whatever it wants under any form of pretense.
Saying that, I think it's easy to see Russia as the bad guys in all this. Think about things from a Russian perspective. When the Soviet block collapsed during the 1990s, the Russian Premier Gorbachev made a frankly staggering concession to the United States and NATO, allowing for not only a unified Germany, but a unified Germany that also was allowed to enter NATO - a hostile military alliance for Russia. Germany had invaded Russia at least twice, within living memory. I mean, as far as gestures of good will go, that's the best you can hope for from a country like Russia. What was NATO's and the US response? Putting missiles in places like Turkey and allowing former Soviet countries to also join NATO. Suddenly, now, Russia faces a hostile alliance at it's own borders and NATO countries, especially the US, are putting defensive missiles and retaliatory weapon systems on alert. The aggression from the west is obvious, and it is purely a show of NATO nuclear dominance. So what would Russia do to counter this? Exactly what they are doing - what any fallible person would really do: building up offensive military capacity. Chomsky in one of his books (I forget which) points out that Russian military expenses have tripled since Putin came to power. The Russian bear is pissed off, and very scared, and not that I enjoy pointing fingers but America is far from innocent in all this. My own country, the UK, also shoulders a lot of the blame, which is why a Russian jet is picked up entering our air-space ever few months now. Remember, too, Russia lost it's superpower status with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a source of pride for Russians - they call WW2 'The Great Patriotic War'. It was very important to them to keep that status. It was a huge blow to the Russian self-image to lose it.
