- Question
- What happened to MH17?
- Position1 of 3›
- Russia is responsible for the MH17 crash
- Argument1 of 2›
Russia shot down MH17 in order to justify an invasion of Ukraine
Shortly after the MH17 crash, the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) declared in a press conference that they believed that Russia actually meant to shoot down Aeroflot Flight 2074, a Russian passenger craft. This would have given the Russians a reason to invade Ukraine officially.
The argument
The SBU presentation of August 8th, 2014 outlined the theory that Russia intended to shoot down its own passenger flight on July 17 in order to justify an invasion of Ukraine, but mistakenly shot down MH17 instead. On this account the disaster was not the outcome its planners wanted, which is why the evidence for it is circumstantial and geographical rather than a matter of stated intent. The circumstances begin with the other aircraft in the sky. Russian airline Aeroflot Flight 2074 was set to fly through the Donetsk region of Ukraine on the same day that flight MH17 was flying through, and both flights had similar paths. The significance of that coincidence lies in where each would have fallen. Had Aeroflot Flight 2074 been shot down, it would have come down in Ukrainian-held territory, giving the Russians just cause to invade — a Russian civilian airliner destroyed over ground controlled by Ukrainian forces would have supplied precisely the pretext that an intervention requires. The geography of the launch site is offered as the second strand. There are two Pervomayske villages in Ukraine, one west of Donetsk and the other east of it, and the MH17 launch site was at the eastern village. The route that the Buk transporters took to reach that site seems illogical if the eastern Pervomayske was their intended destination, but would be more logical if they had been travelling to the western one. That discrepancy is what the theory turns on: a crew routed toward the western village would have been positioned for a different target on a similar flight path, and a last-minute redirection east would explain both the odd route and the wrong aircraft. Beyond this, the Russian military had been increasing its numbers at the Ukrainian border, seemingly preparing for an invasion — a preparation that would require a trigger to be politically usable. Taken together, on this reading, the pretext, the positioning and the mistake all point back to Russian responsibility for the MH17 crash.
Premises
Counter-arguments
There are multiple facts that contradict this theory. One of which is that separatist commanders gave direct instructions to go eastward, which has been discovered from intercepted phone conversations. Also, if Russia was going to covertly murder over 200 of their citizens on Aeroflot Flight 2074, they would have been more discrete in their transportation of the Buk missile to the Ukrainian separatists. Instead, the Russians made no attempt to conceal the missile that they were transporting.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The inference from the transporters' route is answered directly by intercepted communications in which separatist commanders instructed the launcher eastward, which removes the wrong-village reading the premise rests on. [Rejecting P3] A covert operation of the kind the premise describes is inconsistent with how the launcher was actually moved: the counter notes that no attempt was made to conceal the system in transit, which is not the behaviour of an operation whose value depended on the target's origin never being traced.