Kiev Burning

UNT90 · July 19, 2014

HuffPo: Russia Today Anchor Resigns, Admits To Spreading 'Lies' For Putin

More of that Russian propaganda machine I posted about pages and pages ago.

Hopefully a lot of her colleagues follow suit very quickly or else she will find herself in a Russian prison in Siberia by week's end. Edited July 19, 2014 by UNT90

Cerebus · July 19, 2014

Igor Girkin gives an interview to Pravda and claims that the airlines was full of dead bodies when it was shot down. Possible western conspiracy. Fight through the bad tranlation.

Pravda: Strelkov says that the downed airliner carrying are dead people

Separatist leader Igor Strelkov not rule out that the people who died on board the aircraft died in the Malaysian few days before the attack.
---
"According to the people who collected the corpses, many of the dead -" stale "- people have died in several days ago. For full truth of this information can not answer - of course, necessary forensic experts concluded, "- he said.
---
"Thirdly, on anything not insist (so far). Literally just now talked to two people who personally collected the corpses immediately after the fall (both - with Miner and arrived at the scene in less than half an hour after the accident). According to them and write. they stressed that many corpses were "completely bloodless" - like clotted blood long before the disaster, "

I'm torn between wanting him to stand docket at The Hague or to be intimately introduced to some 5.56, either way I hope it happens soon.

Cerebus · July 19, 2014

YAHOO: Dutch PM vows justice for dead 'if Malaysia plane attacked'

"Let me be crystal-clear about this," a visibly angry Rutte told reporters in The Hague.
"Should it emerge that it was an attack, I will personally see to it that the perpetrators are brought to justice."
"We will not rest until they have been brought to book," said Rutte, adding: "We owe it to the victims and their families."

Cerebus · July 19, 2014

Interpreter: Russia Could Make 'Targeted Strikes Against Ukraine': Lavrov

In an interview with the Russian state TV channel Rossiya 24, Russian Foreign Ministery Sergei Lavrov said that Russia is capable of suppressing firing positions, slon.ru reported. The Interpreter has provided a translation of excerpts of the article:

"We have already warned that if this will continue, then we will take the necessary measures. At a minimum, if it is understand that this was done deliberately, I am certain that we must suppress such a position with a one-time method," RIA Novosti reported Lavrov as saying.

This is pretty unbelievable. I think this is actually the position NATO should take against AD systems in Eastern Ukraine. If anything lights up, it gets destroyed, why should the Russians care, it's not like the people manning these systems are actually Russian special forces acting as proxies... right?

Cerebus · July 20, 2014

Polish Weekly General: Boeing 777 Crash does not stop fighting [correspondence from eastern Ukraine]

Translated from Polish:

"Bodies lay between the plane wreckage and luggage. They lay like that since yesterday - uncovered. Officials, rescue workers and firefighters wander around without a purpose." -says for "TP" Pawel Pieniazek from the crash site of Malaysian aircraft.

About 15 km from Grabovo, where B777 went down, rebels stop our car on a roadblock.
- "Journalists? Papers." - orders a man in uniform and with a rifle. This may not be a pleasant conversation.
We have credentials issued by the so called Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) - "And what is that?" - asks a man rhetoricly - "Until I get permission from my commander you have to stay here. You are detained" - he says after a short break. He won't answer any questions.

After around 20 minutes we're getting a clearance.

- "You can go, but take this luggage from the plane" - he insists. Allegedly those where brought by local residents and rebels don't know what to do with them. Neither are we.

Nevertheless they are not eager to negotiate, so we put the luggage in a trunk. - "There's a passport in there" - says one of the rebels. They give us a suitcase, a backpack and a plastic bag. We don't look inside.

We bring all those things to the crash site. No one is really interested in them. I quickly understood why. Few suitcases are the least problem. There are piles of them here, scattered over few kilometers. There are pieces of plane also. Between them lay bodies - burned and dismembered. You have to watch where you walk, cause you can step over a body fragment.

In the background we hear explosions. Those are definitely "Grad" launchers, because their sound can't be mistaken with anything else. As a source within the rebels say, they started a counterattack in Lugansk Oblast and try to smash Ukrainian forces there.
- "They are shooting since morning. Must be a heavy fighting there" - says Oksana, who lives near the crash site.

From yesterday nothing was done with the bodies. They lay as they were - uncovered. Ukrainian officials, rescue workers and firefighters wander around without a purpose. Soon after they start to repair the electrical grid. Only after a few hours a group of local miners was assembled and they presumably went to look for more bodies elsewhere. Others are setting small white flags in places where parts of wreckage and bodies are found. But no one really knows what is going around. Officials don't want to comment on anything. They told us to call the Ministry's spokesperson, but he doesn't want to say anything either.

Aside from white flags and few strings of tape there is no protection. Virtually anyone can get here. Parts of wreckage, bodies, passengers belongings are not protected in any way. It's not excluded that many of this evidence can soon disapper.

On site came also one of the officials from DPR Pavel Gubariev. He came with bodyguards just to show up himself. On most of the journalist's questions he answers: "I cannot comment on that issue". At the end he only says it wasn't them who shoot down the plane, but Ukrainians from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

However some local residents and fellow journalists say something different. They claim to saw a surface-to-air missile fired from Torez. Some of them confirm a "Buk" missile system was seen in Snizhne, which is nearby. Along with it were "the green men", i.e. Russian soldiers without markings. They looked just the same as ones responsible for taking the Crimea.

It looks like though all the chaos suits the rebels, because it precludes honest investigation.

Cerebus · July 20, 2014

Ukraine released this, another supposed recording of the separatists, this time talking about finding the black boxes.

Cerebus · July 20, 2014

Russian news has started to push two new theories as counter information. That a Spanish air traffic controller named Carlos saw on radar that two Ukrainian fighters followed the airliner and fired missiles at them. This of course shows up on no radar records.

Second, that Ukrainians used a MANPAD to try and frame the Russian separatists. This has really caught on on Russian social media, mainly because people are ignorant of what the hell a MANPAD is for. They are designed to shoot down helicopters that (compared to jets) fly very low, very slow and have a huge target area (hitting the huge rotos kills the helo.)

Jets have been hit MANPADS before, but during take offs and landings. People also forget a airliner is much much larger than what MANPADS are designed to kill. The majority of airliners that have gotten hit have been able to stabilize and land successfully. A good example of this is the DHL flight hit at BIA:

The only reason the jet was deemed unrepairable was because it's engines sucked in debris during landing.

So again:

It would take a sophisticated air defense system, like a BUK to hit a jet airliner flying that high and fast.
The only people with that type of system in the area were the Pro Russian forces.
They had successfully used similar systems several times in the weeks prior.
They originally bragged about knocking down yet another Ukrainian military transport before realzizasing they had knocked an airliner out of the air.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

So this is pretty one sided. Any questions, comments, secret recipes?

Army of Dad · July 21, 2014

So this is pretty one sided. Any questions, comments, secret recipes?

What are your thoughts about if Merkel will back up her last chance rhetoric?

forevereagle · July 21, 2014

So this is pretty one sided. Any questions, comments, secret recipes?

My only comment is keep it coming.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

New Republic: The Russian Public Has a Totally Different Understanding of What Happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17

Did you know Malaysia Air Flight 17 was full of corpses when it took off from Amsterdam? Did you know that, for some darkly inexplicable reason, on July 17, MH17 moved off the standard flight path that it had taken every time before, and moved north, toward rebel-held areas outside Donetsk? Or that the dispatchers summoned the plane lower just before the crash? Or that the plane had been recently reinsured? Or that the Ukrainian army has air defense systems in the area? Or that it was the result of the Ukrainian military mistaking MH17 for Putin’s presidential plane, which looks strangely similar?

Did you know that the crash of MH17 was all part of an American conspiracy to provoke a big war with Russia?

Well, it’s all true—at least if you live in Russia, because this is the Malaysia Airlines crash story that you’d be seeing.
---
And that’s when they’re not simply peddling conspiracy theories, which have become a kind of symbiotic feedback loop between state TV and the most inventive corners of the Internet. The best of the bunch is, of course, an elaborate one: MH17 is actually MH370, that Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared into the Indian Ocean. According to this theory, the plane didn’t disappear at all, “it was taken to an American military base, Diego-Garcia.”

Then it was taken to Holland. On the necessary day and hour, it flew out, bound for Malaysia, but inside were not live people, but corpses. The plane was flown not by real pilots; it was on autopilot. Or take-off (a complicated procedure) was executed by live pilots, who then ejected on parachutes. Then the plane flew automatically. In the necessary spot, it was blown up, without even using a surface-to-air missile. Instead the plane was packed with a bomb, just like the CIA did on 9/11.
---
Floriana Fossato, a longtime scholar of Russian media, says that this, coupled with the media’s conscious use of the Soviet language of crisis—“traitors,” “fascists,” “fifth columns”—quickly brings to the surface the psychological demons of a society massively traumatized by the twentieth century, traumas that society has never adequately addressed. The result, she says, is a kind of collective PTSD-meets-Stockholm Syndrome.

In Russians' view, “Americans have recreated the situation where they have excuse for intervention,” Fossato says. “No one admits that they are afraid, but they are. They are panicked. And they are right in being afraid because they know what happened, and they know there must be an answer to what is going on. And so they lock onto Putin for protection. This is why they don’t turn to Putin and ask him to do something.”

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

WSJ: Disaster Highlights Disorder Among Ukraine Separatists

The rebels' organizational inability has led many to question how they could pull off shooting down a civilian airliner. flying above 30,000 feet with a sophisticated missile system. Mr. Borodai says they don't have the technology for such an attack, yet Mr. Strelkov's deputy, science-fiction novelist Fedor Berezin, is a former Soviet air defense officer.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

Gather around kids, who doesn't love a good ol' traditional Ruskie joke?

WSJ: Russia Presents Its Account of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Crash

At a news conference, air force chief Igor Makushev didn't say who the ministry thought had fired the missile that apparently brought down the airliner on Thursday.

But the version he presented followed message conveyed on Russian state television in recent days in which Ukraine is blamed for shooting down the plane, possibly from a fighter jet.
---
In an elaborate presentation displaying radar and satellite imagery, Mr. Makushev said it was likely that the second airplane was a Ukrainian fighter jet.

Just yesterday the Russians were claiming that the only two jets in the sky at that time were MH 17 and Putin's private airliner. I guess that story didn't gather much attention, so lets shuffle the deck again and see if anyone buys this.

ETA: The SU-25 (frogfoot) that the Russians say climbed to the same altitude as MH-17 is a close air support system. It's max operational ceiling is about 10k feet below where MH-17 was cruising (which is why the Russians are claiming bogus information on where and how how MH-17 was).

The only way a su-25 gets that high is if it was broken down into parts and strapped onto a missile. The Russians should know that since they designed and built the damn thing.

ETA: And it has no air to air radar, it would have to be tied to ground radar, and at that altitude the the airspeed of the 777 would be much much higher than what the frogfoot could put out.

The Russians are in effect asking us to believe that a drunk and blindfolded UNT90 was able to chase down and tackle Brelan Chancellor, who had a 20 yard running head start.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Cerebus

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

WashPo: The Malaysia Airlines crash is the end of Russia’s fairy tale

From the beginning, the Russian government did not send regular soldiers to Ukraine. Instead, it sent Russian mercenaries and security service operatives such as Igor Strelkov — the commander in chief in Donetsk and a Russian secret police colonel who fought in both Chechen wars — and Vladimir Antyufeyev, the Donetsk “deputy prime minister” who led the Latvian KGB’s attempt to overthrow the independent Latvian government in 1991.

---

In this task, they were assisted by the Russian government and by Russia’s state-controlled mass media, both of which still constantly denigrate Ukraine and its “Nazi” government. Just in the past week, Russian reporting on Ukraine reached a new pitch of hysteria, with fake stories about the supposed crucifixion of a child and an extraordinary documentary comparing the Ukrainian army’s defense of its own country with the Rwandan genocide.

---

Into this ambiguous and unstable situation, the Russians cynically funneled a stream of heavy weapons: machine guns and artillery and, eventually, tanks, armed personnel carriers and anti-aircraft missiles.

---

Indeed, Strelkov on Thursday afternoon reportedly boasted online of having taken down another military plane before realizing that the plane in question was MH17. The blog post was removed. In late June, several different Russian media sources published photographs of Buk anti-aircraft missiles that they said had been captured by the separatists — though they were probably outright gifts from Russia. These posts have also been removed.

---

Until now, these unorthodox methods have worked well for the Russians. They unnerved and distracted the Ukrainian government while allowing foreign governments, and European governments in particular, to turn a blind eye. Because the war was not a “real” war, it could be described as “local,” as “containable,” it could remain a low priority for European foreign policy or indeed for anybody’s foreign policy.

If it has done nothing else, the crash of Flight 17 has just put an end to the “it’s not a real war” fairy tale, both for the Russians and for the West. Tragically, this unconventional non-war war just killed 298 people, mostly Europeans. We can’t pretend it isn’t happening any longer or that it doesn’t affect anyone outside of Donetsk. The Russians can’t pretend either.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

Telegraph: Russian government edits Wikipedia on flight MH17

A Twitter bot which monitors edits made to the online encyclopaedia from Russian government IP addresses (unique numbers relating to certain computers or networks) has spotted that changes are being made to a page relating to the crash.

It appears that an internet user from within the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say that "The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers".

Very related, I am sitting here watching the English language wikipedia entry for the Su-25 change multiple times recently as all sorts of facts, such as if it can reach 30k ft or not keep changing. Revision History.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

WashPo: Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak’s statement on MH17 agreement

Excerpts:

Firstly, the remains of 282 people, currently in Torez, will be moved by train to Kharkiv, where they will be handed over to representatives from the Netherlands. The train will depart this evening Ukraine time, and will be accompanied by six Malaysian members of the recovery team. The remains will then be flown to Amsterdam on board a Dutch C130 Hercules, together with the Malaysian team. Following any necessary forensic work, the remains of Malaysian citizens will then be flown home to Malaysia.

Secondly, at approximately 9pm tonight Ukraine time, the two black boxes will be handed over to a Malaysian team in Donetsk, who will take custody of them.
Thirdly, independent international investigators will be guaranteed safe access to the crash site to begin a full investigation of the incident.

The handover has not happened yet. Mass confusion as to where the boxes are.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Cerebus

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

Is such a thing even possible?

Russian MOD: "Is it a coincidence that the time of the #MH17 crash is the same as a U.S. satellite flew over Ukraine?" Good lord.
— max seddon (@maxseddon)
July 21, 2014

Yes. Aliens. *Hair slowly starts to levitate*

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

CNBC: Russian media on downed airliner: The CIA did it

Just one day after the horrific tragedy that left 298 people dead, Russia's Channel One ran a package telling its audience that the entire incident was orchestrated by the United States, specifically by the CIA.

---

The government of Russian President Vladimir Putin financially supports and editorially controls a domestic media machine that has become reminiscent of the Soviet propaganda machine, and the former KGB agent has shut down most independent news channels that may stray from the Kremlin line.

Russian TV anchors, reporters and guests still consistently use "terrorists" to refer to the demonstrators who ousted Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine's president, just as they did during the Crimea crisis earlier this year.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

Examiner: Russia’s top 10 lies about downed Malaysia airliner

Highly recommend reading this article.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

I'm torn between wanting him to stand docket at The Hague or to be intimately introduced to some 5.56, either way I hope it happens soon.

Netherlands opens war crimes investigation into airliner downing

Dutch prosecutors have opened an investigation into the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 on suspicion of murder, war crimes and intentionally downing an airliner, a spokesman said on Monday. Based on the Law on International Crimes, the Netherlands can prosecute any individual who committed a war crime against a Dutch citizen. The 298 people who were killed when the plane was downed over Ukraine included 193 Dutch citizens.

The spokesman said that a Dutch public prosecutor was in Ukraine as part of the investigation.

The Dutch prime minister meanwhile threatened tough action against Russia if it did not do more to help.

Cerebus · July 21, 2014

The handover has not happened yet. Mass confusion as to where the boxes are.

Asked if #MH17 black box would be handed over tonight, Malaysia delegation tells me, "we have no idea." pic.twitter.com/0oFcUBIyaO
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM)
July 21, 2014

UNT90 · July 21, 2014

Gather around kids, who doesn't love a good ol' traditional Ruskie joke?

WSJ: Russia Presents Its Account of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Crash
Just yesterday the Russians were claiming that the only two jets in the sky at that time were MH 17 and Putin's private airliner. I guess that story didn't gather much attention, so lets shuffle the deck again and see if anyone buys this.

ETA: The SU-25 (frogfoot) that the Russians say climbed to the same altitude as MH-17 is a close air support system. It's max operational ceiling is about 10k feet below where MH-17 was cruising (which is why the Russians are claiming bogus information on where and how how MH-17 was).

The only way a su-25 gets that high is if it was broken down into parts and strapped onto a missile. The Russians should know that since they designed and built the damn thing.

ETA: And it has no air to air radar, it would have to be tied to ground radar, and at that altitude the the airspeed of the 777 would be much much higher than what the frogfoot could put out.

The Russians are in effect asking us to believe that a drunk and blindfolded UNT90 was able to chase down and tackle Brelan Chancellor, who had a 20 yard running head start.

I accomplished this very feet at an early morning tailgate last year.

If you believe me, stop by for some Smirnoff vodka (or a Smirnoff Ice if you are a girly man) at the next tailgate, comrade!!

Army of Dad · July 22, 2014

I accomplished this very feet at an early morning tailgate last year.
If you believe me, stop by for some Smirnoff vodka (or a Smirnoff Ice if you are a girly man) at the next tailgate, comrade!!

And I bet you were able to do it while texting!

Army of Dad · July 22, 2014

Examiner: Russias top 10 lies about downed Malaysia airliner

Highly recommend reading this article.

Thanks. I think the most disgusting thing I saw there was the fact the "local" officials were taking selfies in between rifling through the passengers wallets and luggage.