Malaysia Airlines 777 Crash (Europe)

[TimothyC]

From the BBC World News Facebook Page:

BREAKING- Reports that a Malaysian passenger airliner
with 295 people on board has crashed in Ukraine near the Russian
border.

The Boeing 777 plane was flying from Amsterdam to
Kuala Lumpur. More to follow.

And the Telegraph has it now too:

[frigidmagi]

BBC

A Malaysia Airlines jet carrying 295 people has crashed in east Ukraine on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

There are no signs of survivors at the scene of the crash near the village of Grabovo, in rebel-held territory close to the border with Russia.

Both sides in Ukraine's civil conflict accused each other of shooting down the plane with a missile. It is still not clear why the plane came down.

It is the second disaster suffered by Malaysia Airlines this year.

Flight MH370 disappeared en route from Malaysia to China in April and still has not been found.

At a news conference at Schiphol airport, Malaysia Airlines' European chief Huib Gorter said they were still trying to identify some of the passengers from flight MH17.

He said of the passengers that have been identified there were:

154 Dutch nationals, 27 Australians, 23 Malaysians, 11 Indonesians
Six Britons, four Germans, four Belgians, three from the Philippines and one Canadian
All 15 of the crew were Malaysian
Other airlines have announced they are now avoiding eastern Ukraine.

The crash site near Grabovo, 17 July
The crash site is in an area controlled by Ukraine's separatist rebels
The crash site in Ukraine, 17 July
Flight MH17 had been due to enter Russian airspace when contact was lost
Flight MH17 leaving Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 17 July
Flight MH17 leaving Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, on Thursday afternoon
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Analysis: Jonathan Marcus, BBC News
If it does turn out that the Boeing 777 was shot down by the separatists - with weaponry supplied by Moscow - then it could significantly alter the terms of the whole debate surrounding the Ukraine crisis.

Over the past few days there has been growing concern among Western governments that Russia was stepping up its military support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Nato spokesmen insist that more and more heavy military equipment has moved from Russian stockpiles to the separatists across the border.

In response, the United States has strengthened its economic sanctions against Moscow - it is threatening even stronger action - though the European Union has so far failed to follow Washington's lead.

But if Russia in any way had a hand in this tragedy then the pressure - especially on the Europeans - for much tougher sanctions will only grow.

Game-changer in Ukraine crisis?

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Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko: Crash "an act of terrorism"
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak spoke of his shock and said he was launching an immediate inquiry into the crash.

"This is a tragic day in what has already been a tragic year for Malaysia," he said.

US and Ukrainian officials said they believed the plane had been brought down by a missile.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said it was an "act of terrorism".

Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told the BBC he had intercepted phone conversations that proved the plane was shot down by pro-Russian separatists.

BBC map
But Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the Ukraine government for restarting military operations in the area, where it is trying to regain control from pro-Russian rebels.

"The country in whose airspace this happened bears responsibility for it," he said.

Separatist leader Alexander Borodai accused the Ukrainian government of downing the airliner.

Ukraine's defence ministry issued a statement saying there were no air force jets in the area and no surface-to-air systems being used against the rebels.

The British government has called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the crisis in Ukraine as a result of the crash.

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US President Barack Obama: "The US will offer any assistance we can"
The plane fell between Krasni Luch in Luhansk region and Shakhtarsk in the neighbouring region of Donetsk.

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Aviation expert: "If this was a shoot down... it would have to have been a sophisticated air defence system"
At least 100 bodies have been found so far at the scene, an emergency services worker told Reuters news agency, with wreckage spread across an area of up to about 15km (nine miles) in diameter.

Broken pieces of the wings were marked with the blue and red paint of Malaysian Airlines.

"I was working in the field on my tractor when I heard the sound of a plane and then a bang and shots," a witness called Vladimir told Reuters.

"Then I saw the plane hit the ground and break in two. There was thick black smoke."

A separatist rebel from nearby Krasnyi Luch who gave his name as Sergei said: "From my balcony I saw a plane begin to descend from a great height and then heard two explosions."

The upper floor of Schiphol Airport is closed for media and reserved for family and relatives of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17, 17 July
The upper floor of Schiphol Airport is closed for media and reserved for family and relatives of flight MH17
A staff member sits behind a closed Malaysia Airlines desk at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, 18 July (local time)
A staff member sits behind a closed Malaysia Airlines desk at Kuala Lumpur International Airport
The head of the Russian Air Traffic Controllers' Union, Sergei Kovalyov, told BBC Russian that the airspace over eastern Ukraine had remained open during the conflict because the planes previously shot down had tended to be helicopters or low-flying fast jets.

"In order to bring down an airplane from an altitude of 10,000m, you need to have very serious weapons…. missiles," he said. "It's either a mistake or a terrorist act."

Ukraine has accused Russia's military of supplying advanced missiles to the rebels.

Earlier on Thursday, Ukrainian officials blamed the Russian air force for shooting down one of its ground attack jets on Wednesday, and a transport plane on Monday.

In 2001, Ukraine admitted its military was probably responsible for shooting down a Russian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea, killing all 78 people on board.

It is believed that a ground to air missile destroyed the jet. The Ukraine government has pointed out that it has not used any ground to air assets in the conflict (and to be fair... The rebels don't have planes, why would an Ukrainian military force even think they need to shoot down a jet). The rebels had loudly and proudly shown a seized BUK anti-aircraft system... Something they're now franatically trying to scrub from their twitter, which is a vain hope as the internet never forgets.

[Lys]

It is likely that Donbass Republic forces shot it down. They've been trying to keep control of their airspace against Ukranian forces, which is both sensible and reasonable, and have shot down multiple Ukrainian aircraft over the past few months. I am inclined to hold Malaysian Airlines at fault for flying an airliner into a warzone, but at the same time if the rebels are enforcing an air interdiction or no fly zone over their airspace it's their responsibility to clearly announce it to everyone else, and I do not believe they have done so. In short, both parties are to blame here.

Of course, there is the possibility that it was the Ukranians who did it. Wouldn't be the first time either. Several years ago they accidentally shot down a Russian passenger plane while running an air defence drill. They were doing a live fire test, and while the Tu-154 was well outside the missile's range, said range is meant to be against manoeuvring targets. Airliners generally fly in a straight line, so the missile caught up with it and the aircraft crashed into the Black Sea, leaving no survivors.

Still, the most likely explanation is that the Donbass forces thought it was Ukranian and fired a missile at it. Whoops.

[frigidmagi]

I am inclined to hold Malaysian Airlines at fault for flying an airliner into a warzone,

This is absurd.

1: It was flying at over 33,000 feet, all warnings were to stay above 30k.

2: It was internationally certified as a safe zone by Russian, Euro and American agencies.

3: It diverted into that zone due to a thunderstorm.

4: It wasn't the only airline to fly that route... Even that day.

This isn't like if I wondered into South Central LA wearing a hooded white sheet and a sign that said "GO BACK TO AFRICA DUMB N*****S" and got shot. This is like if I had been diverted into a low income neighborhood by detour signs and was shot. Of course I should point out that either way it is a crime.

It is possible that it was the Ukrainian government forces but there are several things working against it.

1: The rebels have no jets, why would an Federal Ukrainian force even shoot down a plane?

2: We have the rebels boosting about shooting down a plane at the same time the Airliner went down.

3: We have the rebels franatically rushing about the internet trying to remove the evidence of their having anti aircraft weapons.

4: Recent reports have the rebels sending a BuK into Russia.

It doesn't help that the rebels also have acted to keep people away from the crash site.

And... It seems that the US initial stance is that it was the rebels.

If this wasn't bad enough it seems there were over a 100 AIDS researchers on the plane as well

And a Dutch Senator

[Charon]

Here's a nice little analysis piece by someone who is apparently in the know about such things as missile defense systems.

Charles Duelfer is an Iraq expert who spent more than 25 years in the national security agencies of the U.S. government. He studied the Korean Airlines flight 007 that was shot down in 1983 by a Soviet interceptor in the Sea of Japan.

RELATED LINKS

U.S. intelligence confirms MH17 was shot down

Duelfer has recently headed a small entrepreneurial space launch company. He is currently Chairman of Omnis, Inc.

We spoke to him this afternoon. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity. Watch for more from him on tonight’s PBS NewsHour.

How advanced is the technology needed to shoot down a Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet?

Well to do that takes a very serious and concerted effort. You have to be able to track the flight and the missile and track the flight for a few hours. It’s got to be a Buk missile system — this is a big air defense missile that can reach up to that level. That doesn’t suggest some random incursion. This type of weaponry is in a completely different class from more common missiles known as stingers or SA-16s — those only go up to 3-4,000 or maybe 5,000 feet. This is a big deal to do this. I haven’t seen that it was confirmed that it was shot down — the evidence points towards that, but it’s not confirmed. If it is confirmed that it was shot down then you have a lot of subsequent questions and this is when you would get into air defense in more detail. It would just seem impossible for someone to have just done a horrendously sloppy job at their work so instead you’re looking at someone who made a horrendous decision to do this. (Editor’s note: the U.S. confirmed after this interview took place that the plane was shot down.)

Who would have had access to this kind of defense system in the region?

Well, Ukraine and Russia would have those types of systems. Ukraine air defense from when they were a base for the Soviet Union would have that capability. These things will and should be knowable unlike the last Malaysian crash. These are heavily traveled air corridors. There are loads of NATO signal collectors in the region so there is going to be a lot of evidence about what happened. You will find out where and how this happened. How long that information takes is a question and who was in the decision chain that made it happen with be tough to figure out as well. If this plane was shot down it’s a huge deal.

Could Russia have given it to the rebels in Ukraine?

It wouldn’t make sense for them to do that. The Russian government could deny any responsibility by saying renegade commanders took over the equipment or they could say they were confused on who was operating and in control of the Ukrainian air defense equipment. But it wouldn’t make sense for them to send that to the pro-separatists.

It’s hard to work out how this would give either side an advantage. In the case of KAL007 in 1983, the Soviets thought they were shooting down a spy plane which looked a little like a 747.

How likely/possible is it that this was a mistake? Would it have been undeniable that this was a passenger plane or could it have been mistaken for a cargo flight?

It’s hard to imagine how this would have been a mistake. This is a standard flight route — if it deviated from the route that would bring up other questions, but from what I’ve seen it was on the right flight path. Though even if they were off the commercial route, the Russians are not going to be shooting an airliner. This is a different world now; it’s not the Cold War any more. They would be able to tell if it was a cargo flight. And the other thing is it was at full altitude, this was not a flight about to land or posing some kind of threat.

It’s really hard to figure out in whose interest this would be. It makes you think someone screwed up very badly.

I mean, this is a big air defense act, presumably whatever air defense system is responsible would also have the ability to watch flights in their air space. These commercial flights are so well tracked you know where they are at all times. You have these beacons that send out squawks with the identity of the plane and it would say that it’s a commercial air craft. These radars — and even the Russians have them — have an immediate identification system that will say friend or foe for each flight. They would have known it was a friendly flight.

How might this affect the ongoing Ukraine-Crimea-Russia conflict?

Well, you know, yesterday the president just announced more sanctions, and Russia said this is going to hurt you as well as us, this taking place in that context, well I’d be very cautious about drawing any links or causality, it’s already tense environment people are not going to be giving the other side the benefit of the doubt which will make an already tense situation worse.

There will obviously be statements out of the Pentagon and the White House, but watch for how immediately the Russians react and how forth coming they are — that will be a good tip off. If they don’t react for a while something is up, that would be my interpretation. If they say they are fully cooperative and will launch an active, immediate investigation into this accident and help Malaysians then that would be something else entirely. Looking around I have not seen them say much yet.

I have to agree completely with Frigid here. The idea that Malaysian Airlines is at fault for using a route that had been deemed safe by the International community that tracks such things and which, to that point, ~100 aircraft were using every day without incident (and that's down from pre-war where apparently it can get to 400 planes a day). It was traveling at 33,000 feet and, as the article describes, has a transponder on it constantly flashing and going "I'm a civilian please don't kill me".

Nearly 300 people are dead because some chuckle-fuck decided to ignore that, and to add insult to injury the Donbass "Republic" has basically been pissing in the wind trying to cover up the fact that they might have had anything to do with this incident, so much so that the actual crash sight (which they refuse to let the Ukranians into) has gone completely unprotected. By NPR reporter accounts anyone and their dog can walk into the site, the bodies have been looted, no one has cordoned off the area to protect it so evidence is not lost, no one has documented the site as is proper procedure for such an incident. Fuck, no one's even taken the fucking time to cover the fucking bodies according to the report I heard.

Fuck the Donbass Rebels.

[General Havoc]

A disgusting incident, and the more I read, the more it seems likely that the Donbass forces shot it down. It appears that it was probably an accident, as audio logs have surfaced with people confirming that they shot "the airplane" down, followed by shocked and horrified cursing and exclamations that "it was an airliner". My guess would be that the Donbass forces, who are openly using heavy Russian military equipment, and who shot down at least one Ukranian military plane in the days immediately before this incident, somehow mistook the plane for another such military plane. Given the circumstances above, such a thing should be impossible to do by mistake, but the situation in the Eastern Ukraine is indescribably chaotic from a military point of view, and so here we are.

The local rebel commanders by the way are now claiming that the bodies are all plants and that the plane was a military transport. Putin meanwhile has issued a statement that effectively reads "people shouldn't oppose Russian policies if they want their airliners to stay intact". A pox on both of them.

[Lys]

I am inclined to hold Malaysian Airlines at fault for flying an airliner into a warzone,

This is absurd.

So is you not quoting the subsequent part of the sentence where I say that it was the rebel's responsibility to clearly announce air interdictions. If they didn't interdict the area above 30 000 feet, then well, they fucked up by shooting something flying above it. I would have declared an air interdiction zone extending to the upper range of my missiles, but clearly I'm not the one leading the rebels here.

I still think air traffic should have been redirected around the warzone because accidents will happen in war, and every airline who has their aircraft in that air corridor is putting their passengers unnecessarily at risk. Someone who gets shot wandering into an area where they know there's a war between two gangs is an idiot engaging in reckless endangerment. Doesn't mean the gangbanger who shot them doesn't get to go to jail for manslaughter, though. The theoretical Lys Mercenary who ruthlessly leads the rebels would be publicly reprimanding the commander of the missile battery instead of trying to deny the undeniable, but evidently whoever's actually in charge does things differently.

As for my suggesting the Ukranians might have shot it down, I purposely opened and closed my post by stating it was most likely the Donbass did it. I was just speculating on the unlikely course of affairs and dwelling on the last time something like this happened in the area. The Ukrainian government also denied their involvement with the Tu-154 they shot down back in 2001 at first, admitting it only after the wreckage was recovered, but at least they had a plausible excuse in the airliner being well outside the S-200's range. They might have even genuinely believed it wasn't them at first. The Donbass doesn't have any of those excuses, so they're screwed.

Really, they should do what I say: Admit responsibility, apologize, promise it won't happen again, and throw whoever authorized the shot in jail for manslaughter. If that risks causing resentment within the ranks, they can always just let him out after the heat dies down, give him a pat in the back and say, "Good shot but next time hit the Ukranians." That way they solve both problems.

[B4UTRUST]

Given the circumstances above, such a thing should be impossible to do by mistake, but the situation in the Eastern Ukraine is indescribably chaotic from a military point of view, and so here we are.

A faulty, failed, or improperly encrypted IFF transponder could lead to such a mistake. I'm not familiar with civilian ops check procedures for those things, but I do know that it was sometimes a pain in the ass to get the test equipment to register a proper friend/foe signal from the interrogator. Now you also have the possibility that depending on how the particular airline's equipment is set up of the necessity of carrying at least 2 or more sets of codes depending on parts of the world traveled in. In which case depending on what codes were loaded you could have had one that failed to load correctly or wasn't loaded at all but wasn't apparent until later. To give a brief example of that scenario, I've seen multiple instances where younger guys working on the flightline improperly loaded IFF codes into our load device(the KYK-13) because they didn't run the tape through the loader(the KIR-1C) properly, didn't check batteries, or didn't have settings configured correctly. Also ran into instances where the codes were successfully loaded to the KYK-13 but never properly uploaded into the IFF interrogator or the IFF computer. Or were overwritten by another set of codes when they loaded the IFF codes, radio codes, gps codes and sat codes and they accidentally wrote two codes to the same memory bank. Regardless, the end result was similar in that you could end up with a system that showed a proper interrogation signal from aircraft to tester but was completely wrong(codes not loaded in both tests good, wrong code loaded tests good, etc). This sometimes wouldn't be discovered until much later.

I'm not saying that's what happened here at all, but it's a small possibility to explain how a identification mistake could be made. It could just as easily been someone with an itchy trigger finger and not a lot of common sense. It's exponentially more likely that it was someone just wanting to blow shit up or made a mistake looking at a screen than failed avionics equipment. But having worked on them for years, it's always a possibility that one of the above scenarios I laid out happened.

[General Havoc]

Rebel groups are not famous for their ironclad command/control systems. Mistakes like this are not hard to imagine.

[B4UTRUST]

Oh, I agree, I was just pointing out that it could have been a failure of the transponder set on the airliner that resulted in the mis-identification rather than an outright deliberate attack on the plane. It's not nearly as likely as a rebel deciding to blow up the plan for shits and giggles and I will readily admit that all day long and twice on Sunday(but only once on Monday, because that's my lazy day).

[Lys]

When these things happen, it's not becasue anybody decided to blow a plane for shits and giggles. The crew of the missile battery in question no doubt genuinely believed it was a Ukranian military aircraft. Why they thought so is likely to have been a combination of inexperience, deficient discipline, and confirmation bias. The last one is the big one, the human mind has a way of seeing what it wishes to see and ignoring evidence to the contrary. The only real way to counter it is rigid adherence to procedure, merely being aware of cognitive biases does not help, but that's generally difficult for inexperienced rebel troops.

[General Havoc]

There absolutely are occasions where someone blows a plane away for reasons that amount to little more than shits and giggles. Gaddafi blew one up at Lockerbie just to show he could, and KAL 007 was killed by a USSR controller who had confirmation that the target was an airliner and ordered it killed anyway. But that said, in this case the balance of evidence as well as Occam's Razor indicates a mistake.

[Lys]

Pan Am Flight 103 was not a situation at all analogous to this one. As for KAL 007, the Soviets had no confirmation of anything until after it had been shot down. The pilot who pulled the trigger did recall later that it looked like an airliner, but a spy plane can be trivially disguised as such and it was too dark to see the markings on the plane. At any rate, he didn't tell the ground controllers and they didn't ask. Far as I know, the only person in the chain of command who expressed any doubts about the aircraft was General Kamensky, who wanted positive identification before opening fire. However, his subordinate General Kornukov had no such doubts and Kamensky did not overrule him. Anatoly Kornukov would later become the commander of the Russian Air Force, so I guess aggressively defending the Rodina's airspace is a better career move than not shooting down airliners.

[Josh]

KAL 007 happened shortly after the Enterprise's air group had buzzed the base during a major exercise, which had the Soviets on hair trigger. They had a ground control fuckup that mixed the airliner up with one of our EW birds that ran a similar profile. It was a tragic accident on all sides.

[Lys]

It wasn't a ground control fuckup. At the time of the shoot down, KAL 007 was hundreds of miles off course, on the wrong side of the entire Japanese archipielago, and had already flown over Soviet airspace twice. If there was a fuckup it was in the decision to shoot down the aircraft without making a positive ID. Even then the order to open fire was not given until after the pilots had gotten eyes on target and made unsuccessful attempts to get its attention, so it's doubtful whether a decision to not shoot it down without identifying the aircraft would have made any difference. The pilot did, after all, believe it was a spy plane and would have likely identified as such if asked.

[Josh]

I'm going by memory from The Dead Hand here, but IIRC what had happened is that ground control mixed up an RC-135 that had been hoovering signal intelligence with the airliner. From there it turns into "ID a big airplane in the dark" with pilots who thought a shooting war was imminent and had been ordered that in the event of said shooting war they were to fight so long as they had fuel and to try to punch out over land.

Like most big fuckups, this one had a variety of causes.

[General Havoc]

Pan Am flight 103 was a situation in which someone blew up a passenger plane intentionally for the basest of reasons. That it was a bomb and not a missile is hardly relevant when the point was that people do in fact intentionally lay waste to loaded passenger airplanes. I could cite Air Rhodesia 825 and 827 or Lionair 602 if you wish, the former of which involved people not only shooting the airliner down but machine gunning the survivors after the plane crash.

People knock down airliners for shits and giggles or reasons difficult to distinguish therefrom. I don't think that the rebels did this on purpose, but it's a bit absurd to claim that nobody would ever intentionally shoot a passenger jet down when people have done exactly that multiple times.

[Lys]

None of those were done for fun either, but rather to accomplish political objectives. Regardless, I admit my statement is stupid, but not for the reasons you think it is. I was not saying that nobody would ever shoot down an airliner on purpose, but rather that nobody would accidentally shoot down an airliner on purpose. I don't need to explain why this was a very silly thing to say.

[frigidmagi]

Alright my reply. I'll try to keep it short and snappy.

So is you not quoting the subsequent part of the sentence where I say that it was the rebel's responsibility to clearly announce air interdictions. If they didn't interdict the area above 30 000 feet, then well, they fucked up by shooting something flying above it. I would have declared an air interdiction zone extending to the upper range of my missiles, but clearly I'm not the one leading the rebels here.

I qouted what was revelant. You faulted a airline for sending an aircraft into a area cleared by every international authority and where hundreds of other aircraft had flown already. Even then, they had to divert into that area to avoid crashing due to weather. Bluntly put, the airline is not responsable here, they did what they were told to do by the revelant authorities.

As for my suggesting the Ukranians might have shot it down, I purposely opened and closed my post by stating it was most likely the Donbass did it. I was just speculating on the unlikely course of affairs and dwelling on the last time something like this happened in the area. The Ukrainian government also denied their involvement with the Tu-154 they shot down back in 2001 at first, admitting it only after the wreckage was recovered, but at least they had a plausible excuse in the airliner being well outside the S-200's range. They might have even genuinely believed it wasn't them at first. The Donbass doesn't have any of those excuses, so they're screwed.

And my response to that was to agree that it was possible and then list the reasons why I felt it wasn't them.

Really, they should do what I say: Admit responsibility, apologize, promise it won't happen again, and throw whoever authorized the shot in jail for manslaughter. If that risks causing resentment within the ranks, they can always just let him out after the heat dies down, give him a pat in the back and say, "Good shot but next time hit the Ukranians." That way they solve both problems.

I can agree with most of this, although I'll point out that when the US and the USSR both shot down airliners (also by mistake) the parties who ordered the missile launch were not jailed. The US commander of the ship was quitely packed off to retirement, I don't know what happened to the Soviet commander. At the very least though an admission of guilt and an apology should be forthcoming.

[frigidmagi]

NYTimes

Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that Russia had trained Ukrainian separatists in the operation of SA-11 antiaircraft missiles, the type of system that the United States said had been used to shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine.

“We know for certain that the separatists have a proficiency that they’ve gained by training from Russians as to how to use these sophisticated SA-11 systems,” Mr. Kerry said on the CNN program “State of the Union.” “We know they have the system.”

Scheduled to appear on five network news programs on Sunday, Mr. Kerry laid out a litany of findings that point to Russian involvement in support of the separatists who most likely shot down the airliner on Thursday, killing all 298 on board.

American officials have said in recent days that the SA-11 unit was believed to have been transported to Ukraine from Russia shortly before the plane was downed. And the embassy in Kiev released a statement saying audio of separatist leaders discussing the downed airliner, released by Ukraine’s security service, was authentic.

But Mr. Kerry’s comments were the first time that an American official publicly asserted that the Russians had trained separatists in how to fire such a weapon.

American officials, who declined to be identified because they were discussing intelligence assessments, said on Sunday that a training area had been set up near the Russian town of Rostov, and that the instruction had involved the use of major weapons systems, including tanks and short-range rockets.

Mr. Kerry, in his multiple television interviews, underscored the need for a full and unbiased investigation, unimpeded by anyone on the ground.

On CNN, Mr. Kerry said the separatists had an SA-11 unit before the Malaysian jet crashed, but he stopped short of saying Russia had provided the specific missile unit that downed the airliner.

Asked whether he could speak of Russian “culpability,” Mr. Kerry said investigators would have to make such a legalistic determination. He left no doubt, however, that he thought Russia had enabled the separatists militarily, and he stressed that there had been an infusion of Russian arms to the rebels that included heavy weapons.

“There was a convoy several weeks ago, about 150 vehicles with armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, tanks, artillery, all of which crossed over from Russia into the eastern part of Ukraine and was turned over to the separatists,” he said.

On the CBS program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Kerry referred to a video that the Ukrainians have made public showing an SA-11 unit heading back to Russia after the downing of the plane with “a missing missile or so.”

“So there’s enormous amount of evidence, even more evidence than I just documented, that points to the involvement of Russia in providing these systems, training the people on them,” he said.

Separately, two leading members of Congress called for tougher, more concerted action against Russia.

“I think the nexus between Russia and the separatists has been established very clearly,” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who heads the Intelligence Committee, said on CNN. “So the issue is, where is Putin? And I would say, ‘Putin, you have to man up,' ” she said, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who she said should admit responsibility, even if indirect, for the air disaster.

Ms. Feinstein, a Democrat, added, “I think the world has to rise up and say, ‘We’ve had enough of this.’ I think Europe has to come together. I think Germany in particular has to lead. I think we have to continue with sanctions.”

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, called the downing a “game changer,” adding, “I think Putin is responsible and complicit for what happened.”

Mr. McCaul, a Republican, said that while it was important for Europe to tighten its own sanctions, only the United States could bring decisive pressure against Russia.

Oh Boy Kerry... Meanwhile the Dutch Parents aren't taking the treatment of the bodies of their kids well.

[Lys]

I can agree with most of this, although I'll point out that when the US and the USSR both shot down airliners (also by mistake) the parties who ordered the missile launch were not jailed. The US commander of the ship was quitely packed off to retirement, I don't know what happened to the Soviet commander. At the very least though an admission of guilt and an apology should be forthcoming.

No one involved in the KAL 007 shoot down suffered for it as far as I know. The highest level authorization was issued by General Tretyak, commander of the Far East Military District, so the order went through two generals below him before it even got to the air regiment, then there were two Lt. Colonels below the generals, and finally a Captain at the flight control centre and the Major who pulled the trigger. The airbase commander would would later become the commander of the Russian Airforce. He was the one who insisted that there was no need to make positive identification on the target, though as I said above I doubt it would have made any difference because the pilot did get eyes on target and nevertheless thought it was a spy plane.

[Lys]

Based on what I've been reading, a rough reconstruction of events is as follows:

The airliner was flying on an air corridor that has been used by multiple civilian aircraft without trouble, and had it continued on that air corridor it would have likely reached its destination. However the airliner was detoured around a storm and into airspace which civilian aircraft haven't been using but Ukranian military aircraft do use. Thus the rebels considered all aircraft in that area to be enemy targets, and on seeing the airliner acted accordingly, shooting it as a matter of course without establishing positive identification. It was not until they got to the crash site and found the remains of an airliner rather than that of a military transport that they realized what had happened. They responded to this by trying to cover it up, which any decent PR team could have told them was a bad idea, but I don't think they can afford one of those.

The origin of the Buk SAM that fired the shot remains somewhat murky. I've seen a rebel quoted as saying it was from Luhansk, but other people are saying it was Russian and was quietly sent back over the border.

[General Havoc]

I saw two pieces of footage, one showing a column of about a hundred and fifty military vehicles, tanks included, crossing the border from Russia into Ukraine, along with a Buk missile launcher with four missiles. And another piece just hours later of a Buk by itself crossing back into Russia with one missile missing.

Circumstantial, but still...