She produced a much-discussed report about MH17. In the following year, she was interrogated by Dutch and Australian police officers at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. BBC reporter Olga Ivshina was one of the first journalists to reach the disaster area. She looked for witnesses to a Buk transport and a missile launch, but all people told her they had seen or heard were fighter planes. Her report disappeared from the BBC website just after it was published. A confidential account of Ivshina's interrogation sheds new light on the events of the first days after the disaster.
Ivshina's report appeared on the BBC Russian Service website on July 23, 2014, six days after the MH17 crash. It immediately attracted a lot of attention. Three women interviewed claimed to have seen a fighter plane around the time the Boeing was downed. Another person, a commander of the separatists, Sergey Godovanets, claimed that Ukrainian warplanes were using passenger planes as shields to avoid being shot at.
Within hours of the BBC uploading the reportage, the British state broadcaster took it offline. Immediately afterwards, a rumor mill erupted. Why had the BBC removed the reportage? Because Ivshina had been unable to find any evidence of a missile launch from rebel territory? Because Ivshina had interviewed people who said they had seen a fighter plane? Or because of the rebel commander's statement about the Ukrainian air force allegedly using passenger planes as human shields to protect its own planes from shelling?
The day after the item was removed, BBC Russian Service editor-in-chief Jan Leder denied that the BBC had engaged in politically motivated censorship of eyewitness testimony. He did so via an article on the BBC's Russian-language website. Leder stated that the reportage did not meet the BBC's editorial standards. No context had been offered. In particular, it lacked expert opinions. What he meant by that quickly became clear, as on July 25 the BBC posted an edited version online. It included a statement from a spokesman for the Ukrainian military. He denied that the Ukrainian air force had flown on the day MH17 went down. Another person attached to the report, a British aviation expert, stated that it was highly unlikely that fighter jets would use passenger planes as shields.
Police officers from the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), the organization that led the criminal investigation into the plane crash, interviewed the maker of the rumored BBC report, Olga Ivshina, at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam on April 9, 2015. The transcript of the interview, which was published in 2020 by Bonanza Media, reveals that Ivshina had interviewed many more jet witnesses than she could fit into her reportage. She also said she had been surprised that people had started talking to her about a fighter jet. She had expected to find witnesses to the transport of a Buk rig or the launch of a Buk missile. Indeed, that expectation had been raised by what the Ukrainian authorities had told her.
Before Ivshina traveled to the crash site, she had attended a press conference in Kiev on July 19 held by the Ukrainian secret service SBU. The journalists present had been told that the separatists had gotten their hands on a Buk Telar on July 17 and that they had used it to bring down MH17. Shown in Ivshina's report is how SBU deputy head Vitaliy Naida tells them this. As evidence, at the press conference he showed a photo of a white trail that reached from the ground to the clouds. It is said to be the smoke trail from the launch of the fatal Buk missile, somewhere near the town of Torez. He also showed images of what he believed was a Russian Buk Telar. And so Ivshina left Kiev to go on what she called a "Buk hunt”.
Ivshina arrived at the crash site on July 21. She went to great lengths to find people who had seen a Buk Telar or witnessed the launch of a Buk missile. In doing so, she encountered no problem in her contact with the separatists. "They were very mild," Ivshina recollects. "I would even say friendly. Even if you didn't have a press accreditation they would let you go. They didn't ask for it basically." She was able to pass every separatist checkpoint effortlessly. "The crash site was easy accessible for everyone. It was remarkable. You could go everywhere and touch everything."
To find the missile's launch site, she searched the area where the photo of the smoke trail that the SBU had shown during the press conference must have been taken. After some time, somewhere outside the city of Torez, she landed at a spot where she saw a white plume coming up near a mountain in the distance. She thought it could have come from a coal mine, of which there are many in the area - or perhaps the plume came from shelling at the more distant strategic height of Saur-Mogila where there was heavy fighting in those days. So the white plume in the SBU photo could be something very different from the smoke trail of a missile taking off. "It neither proved that there was Buk; it also didn't prove that there wasn't a Buk. There may be different explanations for that smoke."
At the direction of a Russian blogger who, she said, was in contact with a blogger writing in English whose name she had forgotten, she ended up on July 22 near Pervomaiskyi, where, according to the former, the fatal Buk missile had been fired from an agricultural field. She searched several fields, looking for traces. After two to three hours, she gave up. She found nothing to indicate a Buk launch. In any case, no burned soil or crops. The only thing she found in a field where she was walking around were two men at a combine. These knew nothing about a Buk launch, but they did make it clear that she was not the first to search around this spot. Two journalists had preceded her. (Another blogpost will be dedicated to the findings of these journalists.)
Wherever Ivshina went and asked around, she found nothing indicating a Buk launch. All people said they had seen or heard were fighter planes. "All of them mentioned one fighter jet," Ivshina stressed. "But some believed there were two, and that one of them crashed or was damaged."
Why had the BBC taken the first version of the reportage offline? - the JIT wanted to know from her. She replied that she did not know. She did say that she had immediately expressed her displeasure when she learned that the BBC was working on a second version that included a spokesman for the Ukrainian Armed Forces who denied that Ukrainian warplanes had flown over the area on the day of the crash. "The comment of the spokesman strongly contradicted to the things I heard on the ground from many people, some of them off-camera, some of them on-camera."
The Ukrainian spokesperson did eventually get included in the reportage. But Ivshina managed to get her to add an additional interviewee as well. This was milition leader Sergey Godovanets. He had told her that often when the Ukrainian air force had conducted bombing raids, it was stated on Ukrainian TV that same evening that the air force had stayed on the ground that day. That was true. For example, on July 15, two days before the MH17 disaster, 11 people were killed and eight injured in an airstrike on an apartment building and an adjacent tax office in the separatist-controlled town of Snizhne. Ukraine's Interfax news agency reported immediately thereafter that Ukrainian authorities had stated that the Ukrainian Air Force had not deployed any aircraft that day for the "anti-terrorist operation in the southeast of the country." Two days later, MH17 came down. Numerous civilians say they saw or heard fighter planes that day. Kiev, however, said it had no aircraft in the air over the area.
"It's a complicated story," Ivshina concluded during her police interrogation. "We should be careful not to make any statements or assumptions."
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