To me the title sounds like they just mean the missile was made in Russia, which was obvious from the start. (Even if the Ukranians had been responsible, their missiles were still made in Russia!)
What they actually mean is that the missile was transported in from Russia shortly before the shootdown, and the launcher and remaining missiles went back to Russia not long after. But yes, the wording of the title is way too vague.
The way I read it is that it's more than it was made in Russia, that was pretty obvious, the title implies that they were brought from the Russian stockpile rather than the Ukrainian one.
I'm not sure which title you're commenting on, but if it's the current HN title, note that it's been changed. It previously matched the title of the linked article, which is "MH17 missile 'came from Russia', Dutch-led investigators say."
No, because it's never been a point of contention that the missile was fired from within (some part of) Ukrainian territory. What people have been generating noise about is the question of whether the missile came from Russia (before being launched) or from Ukraine's own stockpiles (being as Ukraine did have missiles of a similar make and description, apparently).
It doesn't actually matter whether someone moved the missile a bit outside of Russia to fire it and took it back to Russia after the fact or did it from Russia.
Also that the missile was transported from Russia shortly before the shootdown, and the launcher and remaining missiles were transported back to Russia. They mean "came from" in a more specific manner than just that it was made there.
That was from social media images that are not news. It was reported on at the time. I'm not sure what's new here other than a two years too late rubber stamp of eyewitness reports.
What's new is that the statement is now based on a great deal of hard evidence and investigation, rather than a couple of pictures and some internet commentators.
> was fired from to a field in territory controlled by Russian-backed rebels.
> "...that came from the Russian Federation," chief Dutch police investigator Wilbert Paulissen said
I think the wording 'territory of the Russian Federation' is not best choice. Report says it was fired from Ukraine, 10 km from border. It implies that donbas is already part of russia.
I agree. These are two separate assertions: fired from location X, and "came" (originated or transported) from location Y but that could be read as "fired" too.
It depends. One possible way is to request FSB to investigate based on presented evidence (illegal supplies of military equipment are their scope of responsibility and we do know that these supplies were not authorized in accordance to Russian laws). If they will not start investigation, then report to the Office of Russian Prosecutor's General. If prosecutors reject the case, go to local court and then up to the Supreme Court. If no success there, go to the European Court of Human Rights and sue Russian Federation. If Russia loses in ECHR, Ministry of Finances will be responsible for paying damages. If (very unlikely, but possible) FSB agrees to investigate and finds the responsible people, likely, it will also find that they were on duty when supplies of equipment took place and, thus, Ministry of Finances of Russian Federation will be responsible for paying damages.
National courts first, then European Court of Human Rights if they will not win in national courts.
Based on this report relatives of victims can sue in ECHR all involved parties, including both Russian Federation (for providing military equipment to separatists) and Ukraine (for not closing air space for civil flights).
Sanctions are a dirty western political trick just so the politicians here can say "we did something".
Sanctions are useless!
Do you know who they affect? Regular people ONLY. Who have no say in politics anymore over there (elections are rigged).
Facts:
1. Top Russian government officials transferred their assets to Europe / USA over the years. They have their families and kids living abroad and going to European/American universities.
2. They have assets offshore not affected by russian currency fluctuations. Most have dual citizenships.
If you want to hit them hard: arrest their wealth offshore; kick out their families from usa/europe.
Why is that not happening? Why are we still allowing illegal wealth transfer through use of offshores?
Why is prime-minister of Russia allowed to own a $20mil apartment in London?
You want to arrest all assets of powerful Russians offshore? I hope you are ready to face pissed off Shell or Mitsubishi CEOs, after their assets in Russia are arrested too.
In addition, you would be playing how Russian government want you: they told their oligarchs last year, that the time to repatriate everything is now (2015). You would be awarding those who listened to that advice and penalize those who didn't. What could possibly go wrong? ;)
The point is to ruin Russia to the point they become North Korea and cannot afford the upkeep for it's military.
Regular people? Boo-fucking-hoo. Maybe if they get off their asses and stop the Putin's insanity...but who are we kidding?
People there dream of good old soviet imperium
The official website of the "Openbaar Ministerie" (Dutch Public Prosecution Service) contains a press release, including some animations and intercepted calls [1] as well as a page with documents from the presentation [2].
Doesn't sound like a possible a reason for me. Conflict in the region has existed for some time, so place for photo cameras focusing was well known.
> is kept secret so as not to disclose surveillance capabilities.
It's not a news that we are being watched, so this reason also doesn't sound reasonable for me.
Any other reason? May they have something to hide?
As I understood many of the so called evidences are based on the youtube movies taken by the cell phones by random people. So that should not be a problem to fake such kind of evidences. Also treating google earth photos like an evidence sounds funny for me.
a) You cannot get high-resolution imagery from geostationary satellites. It comes from low earth orbit spacecraft.
These, by the very nature of their orbit, cannot remain fixed over one place; they move relative to the ground below and once past it, will not be back until they've completed an orbit.
This, then, means that someone will have to prioritize what areas to investigate and at what times; satellite orbits can be changed, but that is _extremely_ costly, as you need to expend fuel - and there's no simple way to refuel; spend it all, and you need to launch another satellite.
So - maybe the US found that something other than Russian-backed militias destabilizing Ukraine warranted their attention. Say, IS or al-Qaeda - and focussed their attention elsewhere.
b) It is not news that you are being watched.
It may, however, be news when a satellite is watching; perhaps the US piggybacks surveillance gear on commercial satellites, for instance - they couldn't reveal satellite imagery without anybody and his dog being able to figure out which satellite took the photo.
Or - the quality of the photos may be much better than anticipated.
Or, for that matter - maybe the US doesn't want to stick this to Russia as hard as they could; perhaps they do not want to find out what the world community would do once it is proven beyond any doubt that Russia gambled that they could destabilize Ukraine at no cost to themselves, only to find that the rebels and their -ahem- advisors of undisclosed origin promptly escalated the conflict by committing mass murder by incompetence, ignorance or both.
As for your last point, I don't quite catch it. Is the lack of obviously faked 'evidence' evidence that someone is having something to hide?
Publically and commercially available imaginary (google earth, DigitalGlobe, etc.) just couldn’t see anything.
They only sense some visible light, and/or near IR (a.k.a. short-wave infrared). You can view some specs there: https://www.digitalglobe.com/resources/satellite-information The clouds are completely opaque in those spectrum, so the land below clouds is completely invisible from those satellites. And the segment of the missile trail above the clouds is very volatile, there’re strong winds there.
Nothing can be seen on those images. And in the video uploaded by Netherlands’ public prosecution office, they told satellite imaginary between 16 and 21 of July is unusable, because clouds.
The problem with that, no one except the US military and government knows for sure, whether they have far IR aka thermal imaging sensors on their satellites, or they don’t.
Fortunately, there’s a solid body of evidence even without that secret data.
It includes a lot of photos, videos, intercepted phone calls, and other related data. The video is official, meaning the investigation team has evidences backing every statement made.
To cut to the chase, the study confirms what was fairly obvious:
- Yes, a Russian missile shot down a commercial aircraft.
- Yes, Ukrainian separatists (Russian supported) controlled the area.
So what's the outcome? Putin could care less and doesn't answer to any authority that can apply restraint or collect damages. So what does this change?
Families of victims can sue. Like with Yukos case, foreign Russian assets can be arrested to pay for damages. It will probably take many, many years and maybe one of future Russian governments will decide that it is better to close that case. There where so many victims that its almost certain that some families will keep pushing this case forever.
The article mentions that they knew the missile itself was a Russian one but not from where on the ground it was fired. The article says that the investigation team now concluded that the missile was also fired from a location that was controlled by Russian rebels (at that point).
I just don't understand how can pilot be so reckless to fly over known warzone?
Hey I'm not saying it's their own fault, but please stop telling me that it's "safe" because it's not. It was a known warzone.
Todays example:
Virgin Atlantic, Air France and Emirates will no longer allow its planes to fly over Iraq due to concerns about the dangers posed by Islamic militants.
You need state sponsored military equipment to shoot down a 10km high flying airplane. You can't do this with your homebuilt rocket launcher.
Up to this incident nobody was thinking that a state could be reckless enough to target civilian planes. Or lend their military equipment to people reckless enough. This has changed since then.
Are you for real? There's war zones all over the world, usually that doesn't mean shooting down a passenger flight 10km high, for which you need specialized equipment, not just a random shoulder carry rocket. Until the incident, airspace at civilian cruising altitudes was free and open in Ukraine. Hint: space is 3d, lower levels were closed in various places.
On July 14th 2014, just three days before the MH17 incident, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit at 21 000 feet altitude, so there was a strong indication that SAMs were available to the seperatists. According to the Dutch Safety Board, the airspace should have been closed [1].
AN-26 was hit with a MANPADS which cannot target altitude at which civilian airliners fly. No one at the time thought that Russia was crazy enough to supply the rebels with BUKs.
While the previous aircraft were downed by MANPADS or AA, the AN-26 in question was flying at an altitude only reachable by a SAM. At the bottom of this article [1] is a good overview of the shot-down aircraft over east Ukraine in 2014.
Thanks for the link, hit at 21000 feet just earlier does change the risk profile, but then again, it's hard for the Safety Board to come to any other conclusion post the facts.
Hundreds of other planes did too, because no authority tracked by airlines reported the area as an active conflict zone --- moreover, among the world's conflict zones, there aren't many in which an airliner flying at altitude would be at risked. The unique situation here is that Russia had deployed extremely sophisticated surface-to-air batteries.
> The unique situation here is that Russia had deployed extremely sophisticated surface-to-air batteries.
Single launcher. Full battery has 4 launchers and a significantly more sophisticated radar. Arguably that radar would have helped to sort between Ukrainian observation plane and civilian Boeing.
And a bunch of other airlines are not diverting from Iraq because they disagree about the danger.
At the time of the MH17 shootdown, some airlines were already diverting around eastern Ukraine, and many others were not.
A reasonable assessment of the danger was made, and they decided that it was safe enough to continue flying there. That assessment turned out to be wrong, but that doesn't mean the it was "reckless."
Everything is a calculated risk. Your question is equivalent to asking a crashed driver how they could have been so reckless to drive that day.
In hindsight, we tend to fall into the trap that the actual outcome was the correct/fated outcome. That we should have predicted it and known better.
A weather forecast that posted a 5% chance of rain on a sunny day is not wrong. No matter if it rains or is sunny, the probability was still just 5%, but we often assume that if the forecast was "correct" it should be 0% or 100%. That's not how it works. A coin toss is always 50%, even after the fact.
The dutch led investigation has been a joke from the start, the previous report they released was submitted to Russia for screening prior to publication, they had them remove any references to this being an carried out by Russian soldiers operating in Eastern Ukraine as all evidence to date clearly shows.