I’d say the odds of the EU and others joining in on sanctions of the rebels’ sponsor just shot up dramatically.
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Because the Russian SAMs aren’t the weaklings the remainders of Saddam’s systems were?
They managed to hit. Wrong target but they hit it. Why do you think they couldn’t hit another target? You think they don’t learn fast? If they are worth their uniforms, they are now poring through the manuals as we talk here. I know I would. (I would feast on the manuals even here, if I could get hands on them. You can get flight manuals for lots of things with ease, off the Net, but a SAM battery manual is not so easily accessible. Grumble.)
Then there’s the issue of the air forces risking throwing ordnance on wrong targets and making things yet worse. For pretty much nothing to gain.
Malaysia won’t send aircraft. They will send investigators, they will send sharply worded diplomatic notes, but that will be it.
And in few years we’ll get an Air Crash Investigations episode.
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At this moment 295 innocent people (of which 154 were from my country) are dead, their bodies lie in some countryside in a far away place. Their families will need to get answers, but right now I really want some sort of specialized team out there dealing with the remains (and personal belongings) in a professional and respectful way before more horrible pictures show up.
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They hit a civilian target equipped with zero anti-missile countermeasures, and which likely lacked the sensors to even be aware of an incoming missile in order to react in any capacity whatsoever.
Modern military aircraft are much, much harder to shoot down. They’re designed to be.
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Well, please parse.
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It’s not feasible. Put it simply, the US operated from aircraft carriers and allied air bases. There was little worry about sovereign airspace. The US has an extraordinary history of air assault.
Check out the Wikipedia on the Malaysian Air Force.
I get what you want to see/say, but it’s unfeasible, not gonna happen.
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They are standing against missiles that are built to take these countermeasures in account. For example, modern heat-seekers have “color” vision, can recognize different IR wavelengths and can home at the signature of the aircraft, not just by “brightness”; the old IR flares therefore don’t work so well and have to be replaced with the ones that spectrally match the engines and their exhaust. Staring arrays are much less sensitive to those flashing-IR countermeasures than the old rotating-seeker sensors. And then there is the problematics of radar missiles and countermeasures that is way beyond the old chaff that chaffed Germans in WW2.
The missiles we talk about here use semiactive radar homing, which is not invulnerable against countermeasures but can be fairly robust if implemented properly.
All rather strongly depends on the versions of the hardware on both sides, and I caution you against underestimating Russian tech.
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Putin has nothing to gain. Blowing up civilian airliners doesn’t intimidate anyone other than people looking to dump money into your economy. It isn’t like the US or Europe is going to suddenly be filled with terror because Russia can knock down airplanes headed into their territory. Russia is already bucking hard under the strain of paltry sanctions imposed by the US and Europe and the fearful view that foreign capital is taking on dumping money into a place where their assets might suddenly be rendered void by either Russia or the US.
This is a disaster for whoever pulled the trigger, and it is likely rebels, as they are the only people with the right combination of hardware and ineptitude. It is possible that it was an accident from the Russian or Ukrainian military, but I find that highly unlikely. Ukraine didn’t start shooting over Crimea because they were so afraid of escalating with Russia. It seems pretty unthinkable that they would shoot at a Russian airplane, even if they thought their airspace was being violated. Russia might possibly have a little more incentive to blast a Ukrainian airplane if they thought it was violating their airspace, but you would think the Russians would be more disciplined and make sure it was actually on their side of the line and an actual military airplane. It was almost certainly the rebels and by accident, and they are almost certainly going to feel the sting for it.
Russia is already cringing because it was almost certainly their weapons in rebel hands that did the damage. Their stock market is already taking a hit in anticipation of the West gleefully exacting a pound of (economic) flesh for arming idiots with missiles capable of whacking a commercial airliner flying at 30,000+ feet. This wasn’t some little hand held toy to knock down helicopters that got that 777. This is serious hardware Russia handed over to Rebels, and the West is going to make them pay a pretty penny for that stupidity.
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The Netherlands has quite an interest here too, and while their forces are small, they’ve been operating in Afghanistan, they have the tech end handled and the NATO allies to lend operational support.
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I hope they keep cold head and won’t make things yet worse by sticking their dicks (and aircraft) into the wasp nest known as Ukraine. This s…tuff has the potential to escalate and I for one would prefer not to have to leave my current comfortable spot in order to avoid being pulled into the Bankers’ Games aka wars.
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It happened on Ukrainian soil, and I am not going out on a limb in assuming that it is a crime in Ukraine for rebels to murder a few hundred people. So, if they are caught, I would assume that Ukraine will happily deal with the legal niceties.
As for military action, there will be none by forces outside of Ukraine and Russia. Malaysia is going to write an angry letter, but can’t do much beyond that. Of far more substance will be when the West starts beating on Russia’s economy harder than it already has. The West has just been taking little jabs at the Russian economy and those tiny jabs have done crippling damage. If the West winds up to deliver an actual swing, the Russian economy will feel it. Their markets are already feeling the pain as people flee in anticipation of retaliatory sanctions. The killing of international civilians with Russian weapons just made the prospect of more economic sanctions a lot more viable.
I’m not sure if this will actually have any effect on Putin and the course he plots, but it is pretty safe to assume that Russia is going to pay an economic price for the stupidity of handing over such weapons to untrained rebels.
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Apart from the Dutch, some of the speculation I’ve seen elsewhere is that Putin is looking for a reason to stomp on the New Russia right wing, and that he’s been unable, so far, to contain them. In which case this kind of public atrocity (in addition to assassinations and other publicly-noted off-leash behavior) could eventually result in a de-escalation. So the problem isn’t so much the McCain-types here in the U.S. as much as their doppelgangers in Russia. So with all the different sides there’s always diplomatic posturing that rides several layers over the real interests of the countries involved. So just as the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans discredited our own warmongers, there seems to be a limit to what the Russian right can pull off.
Regardless of that speculation, the main clash here seems to be that the New Russia types on holiday in Ukr. haven’t got diplomatic layers. They really want to take Cold War nationalism across borders.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukraine’s military campaign against the separatists was to blame.
“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,” Putin said in televised remarks. “And without a doubt the government of the territory on which it happened bears responsibility for this frightening tragedy.”
When you’re dealing with Putin, gains can seem obscure. I’m not reading the huge apology or heartfelt desire to bring the shooters to justice in that morsel.
He’s not seeking to terrify. He’s seeking to disrupt, concern, and confuse. He’s seeking to undermine western influence.
I don’t know that he did or didn’t have a hand in this, either himself or through the proxy of Russian agency.
What I do know is that the Buk system, and others like it, are not push-button toys. They require training, procedures, and some brains to operate. I’m not confusing them with Mogadishu gunslingers firing RPGs off the back of a Toyota.
We all know the Russians are backing the Ukraine ‘rebels’. We know the missile system is Russian. We know the Ukrainian government didn’t train the operators in its usage. We know Putin’s background is KGB and military - so sneaky, nasty, smart.
If you get training in operating equipment like this, the instructor would clearly say ‘plenty of international civilian traffic’. flightradar24.com or whatever it is would have identified the aircraft.
Putin has loosed the dogs, and this was an entirely foreseeable consequence.
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Obviously Putin is going to try and spin very bad news as hard as possible, but it isn’t going to amount to anything. If God appeared before the world and condemned Putin for being an asshole, he would try and spin it.
The only thing Putin would have to gain by intentionally orchestrating this is uniting fractious allies against him. Europe was fighting with itself over how to deal with Russia, and the US was lukewarm about delivering a real economic punch to Russia or an economic boost to the Ukraine without Europe on board. The only thing this shooting did was get those allied against Russia to stop fighting among themselves.
I’ll buy a lot of plausible Russian conspiracies, but this was just daft. It can’t do anything but unit people that would normally would tear themselves apart, isolate pro-Moscow rebels, and invigorate an appetite in the US to send cash and guns to the Ukrainian government. I wouldn’t be shocked if the rebel crew of that SAM are already dead at Russian commando hands for having screwed up so badly.
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No we don’t. And the word is Ukrainian.
No we don’t. It’s an old Soviet system, and is used by the Ukrainian military as well as the Russian.
No we don’t. It’s possible that the operators deserted from the Ukrainian army after Maidan, bringing old training with them.
[quote]We know Putin’s background is KGB and military - so sneaky, nasty, smart.
[/quote]
Yes, that we can be sure of.
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Russia doesn’t care. Really, they don’t. They will accuse the pilot of having done something suspicious and then destroy or clumsily fake the data. And they will laugh in the world’s face as they do it. Putin is not worried in the least about consequences, because he knows there won’t be any.
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Actually it was a KLM flight operating in conjunction with Malaysia Airlines.
Yes, but what if there is no way on earth to blame Putin?
