MH17 shot down over Ukraine

The financial clauses of the new sanctions package go a bit beyond anything the United States has yet done. Specifically, they would ban all citizens of EU countries from purchasing new debt or stock issues by most of the Russian banking sector. The plan also proposes to bar Russian banks from listing new stocks on European stock exchanges, using those exchanges as an intermediary to raise funds from non-Europeans.

The banks targeted would be those firms that are at least 50 percent owned by the Russian state — which include the majority of the Russian banking system by assets. The proposal is similar to sanctions already adopted by the United States against Gazprombank and VEB, two major Russian banks, but would be even broader in their impact. European markets account for about half of the total bond issuance of Russian banks, so the impact on the Russian banking sector — and on the broader Russian economy — would be dramatic.

The US State Department has released satellite photos that it says prove that Russia is using its artillery to fire into Ukrainian territory at Ukrainian military forces. Ukraine has been claiming for weeks that Russia was firing artillery across its border — an act of overt war — but the US did not confirm it until Thursday.

If true, this would be a major escalation by Moscow; for Russia to use its military openly to attack Ukrainian forces would be a step beyond its prior strategy of sending in unmarked special forces and backing separatist rebels. While this is still not as significant as Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in March, it is a big step up in Russia’s eastern Ukraine actions.

Even after the crash of MH17, Europe has been slow to impose more sanctions on Russia for its involvement in the Ukraine crisis — particularly against the energy exports that make up such a huge chunk of Russia’s economy.

This map of European gas pipelines, from The Economist, helps explain why:

The eastern Ukraine rebels who are widely thought to have shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine last week, killing 298, are still shooting down high-flying aircraft. On Wednesday, they fired at and downed two Ukrainian military jets flying over their area of control.

Crucially, the planes were flying at 17,000 feet, according to the Ukrainian government — meaning that shooting them down would, as with MH17, require a sophisticated and highly complicated surface-to-air missile system. That is just way too high to be shot down by amateur fighters wielding shoulder-fired missiles. Ukraine’s rebels have admitted to possessing such military hardware, the Buk (also known as SA-11) surface-to-air system.

Senior US intelligence officials spoke to reporters on Tuesday to share some of the latest intel on the shoot-down of flight MH17 last week over eastern Ukraine. They did not offer much that was not already known, or at least widely presumed.

The jet was most likely shot down by separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine using a Buk surface-to-air missile system (also known as SA-11 system), according to press accounts of the briefing. They showed photographic evidence to back this up.

Maarten de Jonge is a Dutch cyclist who rides for a Malaysia-based cycling team called Teregganu. That means he spends a lot of time on planes — and in particular, Malaysia Airlines planes. De Jonge is the sort of flyer who’s always looking to adjust his itinerary to get a cheaper or more convenient flight — and that habit has saved his life twice in the same year.

In March, De Jonge was scheduled to travel from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, on his way to a race in Taiwan. After arriving at the airport, he found a direct flight to Taiwan, and switched his ticket, but chatted with passengers on the flight he’d been scheduled to take. De Jonge’s flight landed safely. The one he was supposed to be on, MH370, is the flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean and still hasn’t been found.

Russia’s state media machine has a major new enemy to contend with: the internet.

Russian defense officials on Monday promoted a video that they claimed showed a Ukraine-owned Buk antiaircraft missile system rolling through the streets of Krasnoarmeisk, Ukraine, shortly after Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. To prove their point, Russian officials pointed to a billboard in the video that supposedly contained an address in Krasnoarmeisk.

European countries are often said to be hesitant to challenge Vladimir Putin because of their economic ties to Russia. This is true, but those ties are a two-way street — it’s because they exist that European sanctions against Russia sting much harder than similar American measures.

Here’s the one fact you need to know to understand where the real balance of power lies: Russia’s top trading partner is the European Union, but the EU’s top trading partner is the United States followed by China.

It’s a little past 1 a.m. at the headquarters of the eastern Ukrainian separatist group that has seized control of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17’s nearby crash site, but the rebel leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic have gathered international reporters there for a reason. With their audience crammed into the office building conference room that the pro-Russia rebels consider their separatist capital, the heavily armed men are finally — finally — handing off the black boxes from MH17 to Malaysian and Dutch representatives who will take custody.

It is, judging by the missives of those in attendance, a scene of high farce in the style we’ve come to expect from eastern Ukraine’s unruly, often-unpredictable, occasionally drunk rebels. The black boxes, sure enough, were surrendered, but not without a strange and awful little show, led by Alexander Borodai, the self-appointed prime minister of the separatist rebel state, who used the moment to blame Ukraine’s government for the shoot-down.

Europe’s response to crisis situations has frustrated Americans for decades, but it’s a mistake to follow Roger Cohen at the New York Times and assume European nations aren’t going to do anything about Russia in response to the shooting down of MH17. In fact, European ambassadors had a meeting today in advance of a foreign ministers meeting tomorrow. The Dutch prime minister says all sanctions should be on the table while Germany’s foreign minister is calling for the EU to increase the pressure on Putin. The United States and United Kingdom are both leaning on European countries to get tougher.

Things are happening. They’re just going to happen to slowly. But the bulk of the leverage is on Europe’s side — the economic relationship between the EU and Russia is intimate, but Europe is much bigger and richer.

President Vladimir Putin appears to be inadvertently distancing himself from the actions of eastern Ukrainian separatists as his government faces increasing criticism over the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on Thursday.

Putin’s comments to Russia Today — the first he’s made publicly since the crash — largely sidestepped questions about whether rebels used Russia-provided weapons or training to shoot down MH17. Putin instead called for an open investigation into the crash.

Julia Ioffe has a fascinating piece in TNR about two aspects of the Russian media’s coverage of the MH17 disaster. First, they’ve created a propaganda bubble in which the West’s anger is completely inexplicable:

Second, the Russian ruling class are captive to a propaganda machine that now has its own autonomous logic.

President Barack Obama on Monday called on President Vladimir Putin to stop Russia-backed rebels from tampering with evidence and bodies at the MH17 crash site.

The speech was largely in response to reports over the weekend that separatists seized the MH17 crash site and blocked access to respondents.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine on Thursday morning, according to US intelligence. The plane was carrying 298 people.

Here’s a list of what’s confirmed and unconfirmed. This will be updated as the events unfold on, so keep checking back for details.

President Barack Obama is speaking shortly on the situation in Ukraine and the MH17 flight soon. Watch his comments here:

Over the weekend, Russia-backed rebels seized control of the MH17 crash site in eastern Ukraine and blocked access as respondents tried to recover evidence and bodies.

To understand how that’s possible, it’s first important to see just how much territory the separatists currently control in Ukraine. Here is one map, from BBC:

Hundreds of people have died in civilian airliner shootdowns over the past 84 years, and most of the incidents involved militaries.

Twitter user dmanww mapped and charted the recent history of civilian airliner shootdowns in this infographic, which you can click to see the full interactive version. (The embed is too large for Vox’s pages.)

All passengers on MH17 are now included in the toll of victims by nationality. Malaysia Airlines has also posted the passenger manifest. Here’s where the plane’s passengers were from; two had dual citizenship, including one Dutch-American.

Separatist rebels have taken control of the crash site of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine, where it was shot down on Thursday, possibly by the same rebel group. It appears, based on these tweets from the scene by BuzzFeed’s always-excellent correspondent Max Seddon, that the rebels are not just blocking aviation investigators and health workers, but are conducting their own amateur investigation effort.

Needless to say, that the untrained rebels are carting away evidence and refusing entry to actual investigators from the The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) could make it harder for the world to ever fully understand what happened. The OSCE is a Vienna-based intergovernmental organization that works on conflict and disaster management issues such as the Ukraine crisis; its investigators are typically allowed complete access to such scenes. After leaving the scene of the crash, OSCE officials told reporters that the rebels had appeared to be drunk.

Since news broke that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 went down in eastern Ukraine, a flood of information has poured out from news outlets, on-the-ground correspondents, aviation professionals, and policy experts. News articles are extremely helpful in understanding the complexities of the situation, but quality coverage can also come from Twitter — if you know who to follow.

Journalist providing personal, firsthand accounts of the situation

The world in general, and the US government in particular, seems to coalescing around the hypothesis that Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was most likely shot down by separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine. There are several very good reasons to suspect this.

But there is also at least one pretty significant reason to doubt that eastern Ukraine’s ragtag rebels really did this, or that if they did that they were operating entirely on their own. The military technology that shot down MH17 was, because of its high altitude, almost certainly a Russian- or Ukrainian-made Buk surface-to-air missile system. The Buk, sometimes called SA-11 by Americans, is no simple, shoulder-mounted missile: it is a complex system of one to three vehicles that requires extensive training to just turn on.

Early Friday morning, someone at VGTRK — Russia’s state-run TV and radio network — made a conspicuous edit to the Russian language Wikipedia article about airplane crashes.

Previously, someone with an IP address in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, edited the article to say that MH17 was taken down “by terrorists of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic with Buk system missiles, which the terrorists received from the Russian Federation.”

The head of the International Air Travel Association vented his frustration Friday over the fact that MH17 was shot down despite flying what had seemed to be a safe route.

“Airlines depend on governments and air traffic control authorities to advise which air space is available for flight, and they plan within those limits,” said Tony Tyler, CEO of the trade association. “It is very similar to driving a car. If the road is open, you assume that it is safe. If it’s closed you find an alternate route.”

Malaysia Airlines has had a very rough year: 537 people have died on the company’s flights this year, which is more than double the total number of fatalities from all commercial airline crashes in 2013.

The last carrier to experience more than one fatal crash in a year was American Airlines, which lost three flights in 2001 — two on September 11 and another flight that crashed after takeoff from New York’s JFK Airport on November 12.

President Barack Obama just spoke at the White House on the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and confirmed that the plane was brought down by a missile. “Evidence indicates the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile from an area that is controlled by Russian-backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine,” Obama said. The president also confirmed that at least one American citizen, Quinn Lucas Schansman, was killed in the crash.

Obama called for a cease-fire in the area so “a credible international investigation” could be conducted. “I think it’s very important for folks to sift through what is factually based and what is merely speculation,” he cautioned.