By Ken Pole | July 18, 2014 Estimated reading time 3 minutes, 58 seconds.
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 carrying 298 passengers and crew crashed in eastern Ukraine July 17 after apparently being struck by a surface-to-air missile (SAM) en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. While Moscow and Kiev argued over whose forces were responsible, the prospect of a “full and transparent crash investigation” urged by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was being complicated by hostilities between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian nationalists.
The twin-engine wide-body, the backbone of Malaysia Airlines’ long-haul service, was flying at 33,000 feet when regional air traffic control lost contact, with no indication from the crew of Flight MH17 of any trouble. Witnesses on the ground said they heard one or two explosions before the 777 slammed into farm fields, killing everyone aboard but apparently no one on the ground.
Separatist forces have used SAMs to down several aircraft since the insurgency began, including two Antonov 26 transports, one of them on July 17 only a few miles from the 777 crash site. United States intelligence sources have been quoted as saying that the aircraft was brought down by a SAM and U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden said it had been “blown out of the sky.”
The International Air Transport Association said that the airspace in the region was “not subject to restrictions,” but the International Civil Aviation Organization had recently warned its members and their carriers that “the presence of more than one air traffic services provider” in the Simferopol flight information region (FIR) had created “a potentially unsafe situation.”
In the immediate aftermath of the MH17 crash, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a Notice to Airman (NOTAM) barring U.S. carriers from the Simferopol and Dnepropetrovsk FIRs. In an eerily prescient notice issued back in April, the FAA had said that the escalating conflict “indicated the potential for continued hazardous activities.”
Senior U.S. officials are on record as saying that the aircraft had been brought down by a SAM, but were uncertain about where it had been launched and who had fired it. However, if investigators are able to find enough identifiable debris, that would help to pinpoint the source. Russian media reported June 29 that insurgents had seized a Ukrainian anti-aircraft base equipped with vehicle-mounted Buk SAMs, a Soviet-era radar-guided weapon capable of striking well above MH17’s flight path.
The Associated Press reported seeing a Buk system in Snizhne only hours before MH17 crashed and Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny, the Ukrainian security service, posted audio recordings on YouTube and elsewhere in which a man it identified as a rebel commander is heard telling a Russian officer that insurgents had downed the 777.
In a televised comment from Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin (whose administration annexed Ukrainian Crimea in March) blamed the Ukrainian government for the 777 crash. “This tragedy would not have happened if there had been peace on that land, or in any case if military operations in southeastern Ukraine had not been renewed,” he said. “The government of the territory on which it happened bears responsibility for this frightening tragedy.”
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on his official website that his forces “were not engaged in any activity involving hitting targets in the air.” A foreign ministry spokeswoman, Natalya Melnychuk, said in a Facebook statement that “the plane was shot down, because the Russian air defense systems was [sic] affording protection to Russian mercenaries and terrorists in this area.”
