A grandmother who lost three grandchildren in MH17 crash spoke at Kuala Lumpur airport.
Good explainer from AP on why airliners don't avoid risky airspace.
In April, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration cautioned airlines that Russia's claim to the airspace over Ukraine's Crimea could lead to conflicting air traffic control instructions. A few weeks later, the FAA issued a tougher warning, telling pilots not to fly over the area, and the U.N.'s International Civil Aviation Organization told governments to warn their airlines. Thursday's crash, however, occurred outside the warning areas.
Thomas Routh, an aviation attorney in Chicago, said it would be unusual for an airline to ignore such warnings, but he said it's up to airlines to decide whether a flight will be safe for crew and passengers.
"There are airlines flying through Afghanistan airspace every day," Routh said.
John Cox, a former airline pilot and accident investigator, said despite the cautions, the airspace was not closed. The Malaysia Airlines crew filed a flight plan and "Russia and the Ukraine both accepted the airplane into their airspace," he said.
The Kyiv Post has an English-language transcript of Poroshenko's comments yesterday:
Some useful background in The Washington Post about the Buk missile systems:
But the Buk is much more sophisticated than a MANPADS. It is typically operated as a set of four vehicles: a command post vehicle, a target acquisition radar vehicle, the missile launch vehicle (which has its own targeting radar), and a support vehicle. Orchestrating this system requires more training than the relatively straightforward operation of MANPADS.
Such systems are also more difficult to acquire, as they are not widely distributed across military units. Instead they are normally concentrated it specialized air defense units. This combination of relative concentration and high sophistication makes it less likely that separatists could have captured a Buk in the past month and would then be able to successfully operate it.
Instead it seems more likely that the Buk was provided by Russia along with any necessary training. This is supported by U.S. and Ukrainianreports last month that Russia had provided tanks and other heavy equipment to the separatists. Notably both the tanks alleged to have been provided (T-64s) and the Buk are older Soviet-era equipment that Russia would not miss but would also be plausibly present in Ukrainian arsenals. This allows the Russians to retain a figleaf of plausible deniability about the equipment.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko has called the downing of the Malaysian airliner in the Donetsk region the result of an "act of international terrorism." In a televised English-language statement from Kyiv today, Poroshenko said the incident was a "wake-up call" for the whole world.
We ran a story last night about a social media site purporting to belong to separatist leader Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, claiming that insurgents had shot down an aircraft.
There have been doubts raised about whether the site was just a separatist fan site or whether it was accurately carrying Strelkov's statements. At The Interpreter, Catherine A. Fitzpatrick unpacks some of the questions concerning the veracity of the site.
From our long observation of this Vkontakte group and other Strelkov-related pages, we would have to say this is not the case – this group’s publications have long been cited by regional media and the same talking points as the dispatch were also used by Russian state media and Ukrainian media from other separatist sources .
First, the VKontakte group isn’t just a random fan group; it’s an established group of supporters now numbering more than 137,000 followers which has been publishing “Strelkov Dispatches” for weeks, many of which have tracked events corroborated by other sources or which are consistent with the separatists’ narrative as Strelkov himself says on camera in video addresses or at news conferences uploaded to YouTube.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said European states should take the lead in an investigation of the Malaysia Airlines tragedy in eastern Ukraine. Clinton said in an interview with PBS's Charlie Rose on July 17 there was "growing awareness" that "Russian insurgents" were to blame for the downing of the jetliner and that the equipment used in the attack "had to have come from Russia."
Here are three videos documenting Australia's response to the MH17 tragedy.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said "Russian-backed rebels" were behind the shootdown:
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop called for a full international inquiry into the flight MH17 tragedy. Bishop told journalists in Brisbane today that Australia is seeking access to the crash site and she urged pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine to cooperate with the investigation. She said the incident underscored the urgent need to deescalate the situation in eastern Ukraine.
Then an angry Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott demanded an independent inquiry in a televised statement, saying Russia's response to the disaster was "deeply unsatisfactory." Abbott criticized Russia's ambassador to Australia, Vladimir Morozov, who blamed Ukraine for the downing of the Malaysia Airlines, which was carrying at least 27 Australians.
On the question of whether or not separatists possessed any antiaircraft systems as advanced as the BUK. Here's an ITAR-TASS English-language story from June 29 in which "Donetsk People's Republic" sources boast of having acquired "a missile defence army unit equipped with Buk missile defence systems."
Here's the link and here's the text of that news item:
Self-defence forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic have taken control over a missile defence army unit equipped with Buk missile defence systems, the press service of the Donetsk People’s Republic told Itar-Tass on Sunday.
So far, no details are available about the number and condition of the missile systems taken over by the self-defence forces. The press service refused to comment.
The Buk missile defence system is a mobile medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) system designed to defend field troops and logistics installations against air threats in conditions of heavy electronic countermeasures and intense enemy fire.