DISINFO: Ukraine responsible for MH17 downing
SUMMARY
The Ukrainian government is complicit in the 2014 downing of the MH17 passenger craft over east Ukraine. The incident has long been blamed on anti-government forces in the Donbas, but new findings by a Ukrainian whistle-blower implicate the Ukrainian security services in the tragedy. Given the extraordinarily quick reaction of the Kyiv authorities to the incident, President Poroshenko and his press service were bound to have advance knowledge of the downing. Moreover, Ukraine failed to close its airspace before the plane crash occurred, even though the Donbas hostilities had been under way for months.
RESPONSE
Recurring pro-Kremlin narrative blaming Ukraine and various non-Russian actors for the MH17 crash. The "whistleblower," a former Ukrainian Security Service official, does not cite any evidence linking the Ukrainian government to the tragedy, and merely relates the "impression" he got from the supposedly swift reaction of Kyiv. The claim that Ukrainian airspace had been open prior to the crash is false -- all traffic over the conflict zone had been prohibited to craft flying below 32,000ft; MH17 passed the area at 33,000ft. There was nothing to suggest at the time that the presumably ill-equipped pro-Russian separatists would have access to sophisticated weapons capable of shooting down an air plane at that height. Background Many competing and contradictory stories promulgated by Russian state-controlled media on MH17. The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team has concluded that flight MH17 was shot down on 17 July 2014 by a missile of the 9M38 series, launched by a BUK-TELAR, from farmland in the vicinity of Pervomaiskiy (or: Pervomaiskyi). At that time, the area was controlled by pro-Russian fighters. The BUK-TELAR was brought in from the territory of the Russian Federation and subsequently, after having shot down flight MH-17, was taken back to the Russian Federation. 24 May 2018, JIT stated that the BUK-TELAR that was used to down MH17 originates from the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade, a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation.