The meticulous care with which Dutch investigators have quite literally pieced together the events which led to the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine with the loss of 298 lives is quite staggering. When international officials were finally allowed by Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels to reach the crash site days after the disaster, the wreckage had already been combed by looters and, it is widely suspected by Russian experts. Money and valuables were stolen from the remains of the passengers and their luggage. It may be that the Russian investigators also found parts of the Buk anti-aircraft missile which everyone agreed had probably brought down the airliner. But there was no way that the Russians and the rebel Ukrainians could have removed all of the wreckage without causing worldwide outrage and clearly pointing the finger of blame directly at themselves. Thus international examiners finally arrived and gathered up all the wreckage bit by bit and shipped it back to Holland. There it was reassembled around a huge armature. Thanks to an extraordinarily painstaking exercise, they were able to see the holes in windows and fuselage that had been punctured by shrapnel. They were even able to find traces of paint from the outside and inside of the missile as well as debris from the weapon. They were thus able to identify it as a Buk. Next they created computer simulations to see where the missile was when it exploded close to the cockpit of the Malaysian plane. Once they were sure how it had happened, the front section of another Boeing 777, exactly like the doomed airliner, was taken to a firing range, another Buk missile mounted on a platform positioned where the best computer simulator predicted it had been, and then exploded. The resulting real-life damage very largely matched that on MH17. It was not part of the crash investigators mandate to say who had fired the missile. Initially the Kremlin had said that the airliner had been shot down by a Ukrainian jet. That story later changed to admit that it had been a Russian-made Buk but that it had been fired by Ukrainians. Had this been true, it is a mystery why the Russians should have almost certainly tried to clear the wreckage site of incriminating debris. Surely they would insisted on mounting their own investigation or, at least, on working with the Dutch experts. No such request was made. The international community concluded that all the evidence pointed toward a Russian launch and sanctions that were already in place after the Russian occupation of Crimea were tightened considerably. Putin's government of course is insisting that it is the victim of an international plot masterminded by the Americans. The Kremlin was incapable of admitting that an horrific error had been made and that the missile was probably aimed at a Ukrainian transport plane on a similar height and heading. The US is also guilty of shooting down a passenger airliner. In 1988 it destroyed an Iran Air flight from Tehran to Dubai with 290 people aboard. The missile carrier USS Vincennes claimed it thought the aircraft was an Iranian fighter bomber. Although Washington never apologized, it reached a $60 million out-of-court settlement with the victims' families. It seems most unlikely that the Kremlin will even go that far.
