What happened and who was responsible for the horrific destruction on 17th July of Malaysian Airways Flight MH17 is still not clear amid the welter of claims, counterclaims, and downright lies. The aircraft’s black boxes may show that it was brought down by a missile. But that will not tell us who fired the missile or why. Nevertheless there are nuggets of what looks like fact.
Early on Thursday afternoon Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine were heard to claim that they had shot down a Ukrainian military An-26, a comparatively small propeller-driven aircraft which looks nothing like a big jet. Next came an intercepted conversation between two worried Russians saying that a bunch of Cossacks manning a rebel checkpoint had indeed downed a civilian airliner. Since the aircraft was flying too high to be hit by the hand-held anti-aircraft missiles hitherto available to the separatists, the Ukrainians, Americans, and others argued that they must have used a sophisticated BUK missile launcher, which requires a trained crew and must have been brought in from Russia. The Russians quickly denied that.
Presumably someone knows the truth, not least the more sophisticated bits of the American intelligence machine. But even to the outsider it already seems probable that it was separatists who shot the plane down, less probable that they did so with the active connivance of Russian government agents on the spot, and not at all probable that the Russian government itself directly approved something that could only complicate its life.
Putin and his people have huffed and puffed. But their language has been fairly circumspect. They have refrained from taking up positions on matters of fact that might later be disproved by events. Putin has expressed his condolences to the Malaysians, and to the Dutch who lost many of their people on the plane, and called a minute’s silence at a meeting of his officials. He has said, rightly, that the crash must be thoroughly and objectively investigated, and called for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in Ukraine without which the tragedy could not have occurred. More waspishly, he has added that it is always the country where these things happen—in this case Ukraine—that bears the main responsibility.
There, of course, he is quite wrong. He glories in his position of chief executive of a restored Russia. The policy of reasserting Russian control over at least a part of Ukraine is his policy. Whether he chooses to recognise it or not, he cannot avoid responsibility for the consequences, including what has now happened.
Until recently he seemed to have achieved most of what he wanted in Ukraine. He had detached Crimea, he had made Ukrainian membership of NATO unfeasible for the foreseeable future, and he had ensured that Russia would be consulted about Ukrainian affairs. It is unlikely that, as some feared, he wanted to go further and take over large chunks of Ukraine itself by force, with all the trouble that could bring to the Russian economy and to his own international and domestic position. Recently he has seemed increasingly concerned that his control over the pro-Russian bully boys in Eastern Ukraine was slipping: he has evidently been trying to rein them in and de-escalate the crisis. The downing of Flight MH17 can only make his life harder.
As for us in the West, we are left with the same imperfect instruments for bringing pressure to bear on Putin that we had before: sanctions, whose impact is unclear; an overdue strengthening of NATO’s arrangements in Eastern Europe for which many of the allies have neither the money nor the will; and the expensive and delicate task of helping Ukraine restore its tottering political and economic systems.
This is far from the first time that a civilian airliner has been shot down. Two notorious examples were the downing by a Soviet fighter of a Korean airliner in 1983, and of an Iranian airliner by an American warship in 1988. Both were the product of confusion and incompetence. After the initial outrage, neither made much difference to the course of history.
Images of the separatists’ grotesquely callous handling of the victims’ bodies have been seen across the world: they could hint at a guilty conscience and are likely to damage Putin’s reputation—and Russia’s—for a long time to come. What happened to Flight MH17 may stiffen the backbones of America and Europe in their dealings with Russia. But although the destruction of nearly 300 innocent people will remain a great tragedy, it too may not turn out to be a game changer.
