EU Referendum


Ukraine: propagandised by the slaughter


23/07/2014



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 I had no idea last Thursday, when I first heard of the downed MH17 that, five days later I'd still be writing about the issue, virtually without break. Thrown into the deep end, with James Delingpol asking me to do a piece for Breitbart, I got just over an hour to research and write it at a time when there was very little published.

At that time, it should be recalled, the Mail was describing the BUK as a "shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile" that "can be packed into a golf bag and assembled and fired very rapidly by one person with minimal training". 

It was only a few hours later that the Sun was coming off the printing presses with the headline: "Putin's missile", setting the scene for the rest of the media which had already decided that the Russians in general and their President in particular were responsible for downing the Malaysian Boeing with the loss of 298 lives.

Why this is so very wrong, of course, is not because we assert, or even believe, that Putin is innocent. Simply, in this country where the rule of law is supposed to prevail, we do not – or should not – do things this way. To decide on guilt before an investigation has even been started is mob rule.

My first full blogpost, therefore, I sought to explore the reasons why MH17 has been so tragically downed, and to establish some of the events that lay behind the incident, something that was never going to be easy.

In the six more blogposts written, here, here, here, here, here and here we have covered a great deal of ground but have yet adequately to express the sentiment in the latest piece by Mary Ellen Synon, who asserts: "Pinning everything on Putin is too easy".

The British newspapers, she writes, like the British government, are pinning the blame for the Malaysian Airlines disaster on Putin. Most Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, would see things the way these UK headlines do: "Putin is a pariah – he must be treated as such"; "Britain and America implicate Russia in Flight MH17 missile attack"; and "Two British families killed by 'Putin the terrorist'".

Even the politicians are getting in on the act. A column written by Prime Minister David Cameron bore this headline: "This is an outrage made in Moscow".

However, writes Mary Ellen Synon, some well-informed conservatives in Britain are pointing the finger for the war in Ukraine not at Putin, but at the empire builders of the European Union. Peter Hitchens, a leading British conservative commentator, summed up the argument in the Mail on Sunday:
… those who began the current war in Ukraine – the direct cause of the frightful murder of so many innocents on Flight MH17 on Thursday – really have no excuse. There is no doubt about who they were. In any war, the aggressor is the one who makes the first move into neutral or disputed territory.

And that aggressor was the European Union, which rivals China as the world's most expansionist power, swallowing countries the way performing seals swallow fish (16 gulped down since 1995).

Ignoring repeated and increasingly urgent warnings from Moscow, the EU – backed by the USA – sought to bring Ukraine into its orbit. It did so through violence and illegality, an armed mob and the overthrow of an elected president.
As for the question of Vladimir Putin arming the pro-Russian militia with BUK missiles, M E Synon accepts that the evidence points in another direction: the missiles were not supplied by Putin, but were among the arms stolen by the militia from a Ukrainian military unit at the end of June.

That is not to say there is proof, nor even good evidence, but the fact that the BUK missile is on the Ukrainian Army inventory, that it has been reported in the area, that separatists claimed to be in possession of them after Military unit A1402 (Donetsk SAM regiment) was captured on 29 June or thereabouts, and that we have a separate voice claiming that equipment was repaired and delivered to the insurgents, all constitutes a plausible narrative.

On the other hand, the politico-media nexus seems to rely entirely on circumstantial evidence, mainly on the premise that the equipment is so complex that the separatists could not operate it without outside assistance.

To support this assertion, much is made of the difficulty of operating a complete tactical unit, with search radar, the command vehicle and the launcher, while not allowing that the launcher is capable of autonomous operation, and vastly more simple to operate.

No one is asserting that untrained operators could use the equipment to shoot down an aircraft but, as the website quoted notes, "untrained" is a relative term. To be able to fire at a "soft" target such as an airliner, the operator needs relatively little training (a few hours of seeing the system in action and getting some answers to the "why did you push that button?"-type of questions).

With the media trailing behind the curve, though, we have the Guardian striving to prove that which we do not see the need to contest – that there was a BUK M1 launcher in the hands of the separatists on the day MH17 was shot down.

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Nor would we contest the idea that the same BUK, once it had brought down MH17, was moved across the border to Russia. Unlike the 312 launcher, it seems as if the YouTube pictures of the while transporter, with the blue flash on the side of the cab (pictured above),  may have been genuine, despite Russian attempts to muddy the water. 

It appears that the YouTube position has been narrowed down to the rebel controlled city of Luhansk, around 30 miles from the area where it was reportedly sighted earlier in the day, and about 30 miles by road from the Russian border. Strangely, though, the location is in a residential area of the town, off the main route to the border.

That, therefore, is not evidence of Russian government complicity in the supply of the weapon to the separatists and what characterises the entire case against the Russians is that no evidence of any nature has been produced to support such a claim. Five days after MH17 was downed, we've seen assumption, conjecture and assertion, but no evidence.

And, at last, we get official confirmation: via Fox News and others, we are told that senior US intelligence officials will only says that Russia was responsible for "creating the conditions" that led to the shooting down of MH17, but have offered no evidence of direct Russian government involvement.

The intelligence officials were "cautious in their assessment", noting that while the Russians have been arming separatists in eastern Ukraine, the US had no direct evidence that the missile used to shoot down the airliner came from Russia.

As it stands, my best guess remains that a single BUK launcher was seized from the Ukrainian Army on 29 June, but in a non-operational state. It may well have been transported into Russia where it was repaired by "civil society", and then returned to the separatists on or about 13 July and put to use against the An-26 on 14 July. It was used again on 17 July to shoot down MH17 and the taken back over the border that evening, before nightfall.

This is all part of what Hitchens calls a "filthy little war" that has been under way in Eastern Ukraine for many months. Many innocents have died, unnoticed in the West. Neither side has anything to boast of – last Tuesday, eleven innocent civilians died in an airstrike on a block of flats in the town of Snizhne, which Ukraine is unconvincingly trying to blame on Russia.

But, if there is going to be any resolution of this slaughter, we are going to have to work with Putin and the Russians. Unwholesome, unreliable and aggressive Putin may be, but calling him a murderer and accusing him and his government of conspiring to bring down an airliner full of innocent people is got going to help us prevent further slaughter. And neither will further sanctions nor other empty gestures.

"So please", writes Mary Ellen, "do not be propagandised by Thursday's horrible slaughter into forgetting what is really going on". In my view, we owe it to ourselves to assert our own civilisation, and uphold the values that others so freely traduce. We do not do this for Putin. We do it for ourselves.

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