Malaysia Airlines MH370

why is everyone talking about putin i though it was pretty clear the separatists shot this plane down. i'm confused

What's with the trolling dude?

putin is also confused

i'm serious what did putin do

Putin aids the separatists. They on his team. If they did this, at the very least it reflects badly on him. And at most, Russia was involved (helped man that BUK missile system, gave orders, etc).

do we have documentation that putin has aided the separatists and do we have any indication that russia was involved.

this all smells of speculation to me.

Plus - and this might be hard to understand for someone who yesterday was all like 'huh why does the world care about what Obama thinks about this' - not only will Russia be in a huge tizzy about this, it also seriously puts his every action in Ukraine in the limelight (finally). This is a global deal now.

Yes, I have all the documentation you need. Brb faxing it to you now.

what every action of his.

do you really think russia wasn't in the 'limelight' about the ukraine before? seriously? that shit has been inescapable.

u can use a hyperlink with the blue text too you know, xpost

Inescapable? Really? The Maidan riots were well reported, sure, but after that the US - for reasons of its own - did all it could to stay out of the Ukraine thing. So did Europe. Now they just can't anymore. Hence then UN security committee feeling obliged to meet today. Different dawn, dude.

i'm all for keeping the team-reddit-catch-the-boston-bombers theories masquerading as helpfully reposting tweets and "news alert" stuff where it belongs

... but western media and governments are on record that at least some of the "separatists" are from russia, not ukraine, and many are ex-military (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27231649 etc. etc. etc.) and it seems obtuse to deny this.

s.clover, why do you think putin wouldn't sponsor russian separatists in ukraine, given your knowledge of his recent involvement there, and previously in crimea?

Otm xp

Now they just can't anymore. - wouldn't be so sure about this

that being said (xp to self)...

i'm all for keeping that team-reddit-catch-the-boston-bomber stuff where it belongs *especially*

1) given the dishonest record of the many actors involved in this situation

2) having spoken to a woman flying MH next week while getting coffee this morning, and heard the straight up garbage she believed about the situation, and hearing how upset she'd made herself about the prospect.

but if you feel like you're being useful by begin the first to post "developments" to social media then... i dunno, it's your journey

Caek, i'm not denying that russian people are involved, i'm just asking about direct involvement of the putin govt.

SEO Hall of Fame Link Name

direct involvement in this specific incident, no, but indirect culpability is being pretty heavily hinted at by the US and UK govts, for what that's worth:

At an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council called by Britain, the UK’s ambassador Sir Mark Lyall Grant said “searching questions” had to be asked about Russia’s links with armed separatists and called for Moscow to issue an “unequivocal condemnation” of their actions.

He said without Russian support the armed groups would “wither” and claimed three Russian citizens were leading figures in the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic.

Sir Mark said: “We have to ask searching questions about why we are now confronting this tragic situation. Russian officials have claimed that armed separatists in eastern Ukraine represent a spontaneous local insurgency.

“We know that this is not the case. We know that the three leading figures of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic are Russian citizens and have come from outside Ukraine. We know that weapons, equipment and logistical support has been systematically provided to armed separatist groups by Russia.”

Those weapons included tanks, artillery pieces and up to 100 man-portable surface-to-air missiles - although these are not the weapons believed to have been used to bring down MH-17.

Sir Mark said: “The United Kingdom urges Russia to reflect carefully on the situation they have created. We urge Russia to cease its policy of supporting armed separatist groups and their violent actions, of destabilising a neighbouring country, of generating displacement and social and economic hardship.

Fwiw, Putin has been heavily criticised within Russia for not doing anything to actively help the separatists and I suspect if there was any firm evidence that tanks and heavy artillery were being provided, we would have seen it by now.

That said, hundreds of armed nationalists, former soldiers, cranks, etc don't cross national borders without tactic permission and the tone struck by the Kremlin and filtered through the tame press encourages this. Whatever active influence Moscow may have had over the separatists looks to have waned but having the conflict run and run is a handy distraction from the one thing Russia does genuinely care about - Crimea. Neither Putin or Poroshenko seem to care that much about the civilian cost.

Goes without saying that Ukraine is culpable too.

I know there were conflicting reports earlier about how the rebels would have got their hands on weapons capable of downing the plane, but assuming it was a "Russian-built, vehicle-mounted Buk missile system" (as per the Guardian), do we know where that would likely have come from?

thx eazy!

god that stuff drives me nuts

They got two from a Ukrainian air base. Both Ukraine and the separatists have claimed the two they took were not operational, but this seems highly unlikely now.

The Buk system has four or five separate parts, iirc, including two radars. It seems likely that they only got some of the parts, allowing them to launch missiles but not giving them a clear picture of what they were firing at.

serious question: does anybody believe the tweets and phone intercepts are fake? my friend who is seo guy was going on and on about how internet marketers create fake people all the time. i think occam's razor applies, he says it happens in SEO all the time so it's plausible it could be faked

It seems likely that they only got some of the parts, allowing them to launch missiles but not giving them a clear picture of what they were firing at.

Great combination.

xp they do read a little bit like they were written by a russian-speaking reddit user tbh

The Strelkov VK update was probably real, the phone intercepts are as questionable / reliable as any phone intercepts from dubious ex-KGB states.

This article says that if you're just relying on radar you can't actually tell the difference between a cargo transport and a commercial plane:

Latiff said that if they had only one radar, as Ukrainian officials suggest, it would have been pointed at the target. A second, rotating one would normally have been part of a battery to pick up other planes in the immediate vicinity, but he said even that would not have established whether it was a commercial plane and there would normally have been communications equipment to pick up signals showing the plane was non-military.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/separatist-links-malaysia-airlines-mh17-removed

The United States government has concluded that the passenger jet felled over Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory and most likely provided by Russia to pro-Moscow separatists, officials said on Friday.

While American officials are still investigating the chain of events leading to the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday, they pointed to a series of indicators of Russian involvement. Among other things, military and intelligence officials said there was mounting evidence that a Ukrainian military plane shot down just three days earlier had been fired upon from inside Russian territory by the same sort of missile battery used to bring down the civilian jet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

So if this is correct, then it wasn't the BUK system that they took from the Ukrainian military.

Doesn't seem to be any solid evidence there. The allegation about Russia firing missiles into Ukraine related to a different missile system (GRAD rather than Buk). You couldn't hit anything in Ukraine from Russia with the latter and there has been no suggestion so far that the separatists have the former.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/07/nato-general-warned-of-russian-anti-aircraft-training-for-separatists/

USAF and NATO said back on June 30 they had intelligence indicating Russia had been training the separatists to use "vehicle-born" surface to air missiles.

Still waiting for someone to blame Israel for all this

israel more interested in killing children on the ground than adults in the air

i'm pretty cynical but given the fact that there were children on board that post is pretty gross

you're right, maybe israel was involved then. branching out and killing children wherever they may find them - on the beaches, in the air.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

<-- rebels and kyiv jockeying to handle bodies, recovery of debris, etc.

also more details about what military tech the rebels may have had, when, and where

xpost

i'm not exactly zionist no. 1 but that's still pretty gross, but whatever, it's ilx.

ugh please don't bring Israel/Palestine into this.

i agree

(btw i think i have spent the past year or two thinking "balls" was "cutty." does "cutty" post on ilx anymore? he was the lawyer, right?)

balls is not cutty.

cutty posts as underrated aerosmith etc now iirc

i thought that was t0m h4milt0n, so confused

anyway, let's not dwell on this here. sorry.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118770/who-igor-bezler-russian-rebel-implicated-malaysia-flight-17

started new thread for discussion of current events: Malaysian flight MH17 / Ukraine conflict 2014

PBS' Nova covers the disappearance.Good summary of everything.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/why-planes-vanish.html

Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Hampered by Disagreements

The five teams of investigators were made up of officials from Boeing, Inmarsat, France’s Thales Group , the U.S.’s National Transportation Safety Board, and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Each was asked by the ATSB to analyze the data independently and draw their own conclusions.

“Originally we thought we had a consensus among the five groups, based on the best data available at the time,” Mr. Dolan, head of the Australian air-accident investigator, said in an interview. “Once we refined the data again the methodologies diverged.”

Investigators haven’t made clear why using an autopilot would result in such a different flight path from that suggested by the plane’s satellite signals. Mr. Dolan declined to say which of the experts supported which of the crash-site theories. Representatives from the NTSB, Inmarsat, and Thales said they couldn’t immediately comment, and a Boeing spokesman declined to comment[

Because 2014 is the worst: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2888817/Flight-Indonesia-Singapore-loses-contact--media.html