The Kiev Junta Did It + Israel Invades Gaza

Before moving to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines jet over Grabovo, Ukraine, a few words on Israel's invasion of Gaza, which began yesterday. Jodi Rudoren has the story, "1 Israeli, 20 Palestinians Killed in Gaza Ground Offensive." I mistakenly believed that Israel's talk of a ground assault was a feint while another ceasefire was worked out in Cairo with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Well, they pulled the plug on those talks:

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, whose meetings in Cairo on Wednesday and Thursday failed to produce a cease-fire agreement, told reporters there that the ground operation would “lead to more bloodshed and complicate efforts to end the aggression,” according to WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency. Mr. Abbas was scheduled to travel to Turkey and perhaps Qatar on Friday to continue cease-fire discussions.

Where the conflict goes now is anybody's guess. Israel's stated purpose is to close the tunnels that Hamas uses to smuggle its rockets, which I suppose has the advantage of Netanyahu being able to declare victory whenever he wants. Who is to say how many tunnels actually exist? They don't appear on Google Maps. So Israel will rack up a large body count and administer as much destruction as possible. The wild card is what happens in Israel and the West Bank. Israel's Western allies will certainly shield her from any official condemnation. But what of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Israel? Will a third intifada develop? So far Israel is coming out on top because the conflict remains what appears to be the latest iteration of Operation Cast Lead.

Now to the war in Novorossiya and who is responsible for blowing the Boeing 777 commercial jetliner, carrying 298 passengers, out of the sky. Ukraine has posted audio of an intercepted phone conversation from a militia leader named Igor Belzer where he claims to have shot down a plane. This is being covered by the Gray Lady, but it is being treated with kid gloves. No one is embracing it; that is how low the credibility of the junta is even by news organs that have supported Kiev's legitimacy from the outset.

Sabrina Tavernise and Keith Bradsher, two topnotch reporters, have the lede story this morning on the Malaysia Airlines jet, "Russia Denies Role in Downing of Airliner." They puncture the junta's claim that a ragtag militia under the command of a Belzer could launch a fancy missile system capable of bringing down a commercial passenger jet traveling at 33,000 feet

Peter Marosszeky, a longtime aircraft engineer and former senior executive at Qantas, PanAm and American Airlines who advised Boeing on the development of the 777 aircraft, said in a telephone interview that the 777-200 had an extremely long range and would have enough fuel to divert around a dangerous area during a 12-hour flight if the pilots chose to do so. But he said that airlines have typically not worried until now about surface-to-air missiles reaching planes at cruising altitude, because only a very large missile with a lot of fuel could ascend such a distance. 

Mr. Marosszeky expressed skepticism that militiamen could readily fire such a large missile without training as well as cooperation from whoever owned or manufactured the missile. “You’ve got to have special codes and so forth to operate these things,” he said.

Tavernise was on the scene in Grabovo and talked to Novorossiya fighters there. They said point blank that their side had nothing to do with it. It rings true:

As a cloudy dawn came, the full horror of the field was on display. Small white pieces of cloth dotted the grassy farmland, marking the spots of bodies. 

Four rebels in fatigues were wandering through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings and riffling through guidebooks and bags. 

When asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military. 

“This wasn’t ours,” said a rebel who identified himself only as Alexei, standing looking at an overhead bin in the grass with a rifle over his shoulder. “Why would we do this? We’re not animals.”

Tavernise's interviews from around the crash site revealed that the flash of the missile originated from Snizhne (the city that was on the news earlier this week when Ukraine accused Russian military aircraft of blasting apart a four-story apartment building and killing 11 civilians):

The crash remained the subject of intense debate in the small Ukrainian town of Grabovo, as residents tried to come to grips with what had unfolded in the fields where they work, just yards from their homes. 

Two villagers said quietly that they had seen the flash of a rocket in the sky around the time the plane went down. Victor, who said he was too afraid to give his last name, said that he had been in his garden at the time and that he had seen “the light coming from a rocket.” 

He said it had come from the direction of Snizhne, a city where the Ukrainian military has been bombing rebel positions frequently for more than a week. “It was a rocket, I’m sure of it,” he said.

The smoking gun here is not the bogus Belzer intercept but the activities in and around Snizhne. Let's go back to that story by David Herszenhorn that appeared yesterday, "Ukraine Says Russian Plane Shot Down Its Fighter Jet":

Ukraine and Russia have traded several accusations of cross-border hostilities in recent days. The Russian Foreign Ministry, for instance, warned of potentially “irreversible consequences” after a man was killed in the Russian city of Donetsk, which shares the same name as the regional capital in eastern Ukraine where rebel forces have been regrouping in recent days. The Russians said the man was killed by a mortar shell fired from the Ukrainian side of the border. 

Ukraine, in turn, has accused Russia of firing a rocket that destroyed an Antonov-26 military transport plane on Monday, and Ukraine also accused Russian military planes of carrying out an airstrike that destroyed a residential building and killed 11 people in the town of Snizhne on Tuesday morning.

The junta's southeast offensive had been routed; its military was behaving in an increasingly erratic fashion -- shelling Russia, blowing apart buildings and then blaming Russia, seeing Russian fighter jets blotting out the sun. This is a description of power coming unhinged. Downing a passenger jet is just what you would expect.