The story we are supposed to believe about the MH17 plane crash is stranger than fiction. Is it grounded in reality? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Did the Joint Investigation Team, that lead the criminal investigation, provide such evidence? What really happened to MH17? I spent thousands of hours to find out. I’m now sharing with you my findings. I invite you to follow me on my journey.
On 17 July 2014 all 298 passengers of flight MH17, most of them of Dutch nationality, died, when their plane, that took off in Amsterdam and that was heading for Kuala Lumpur, was shot down in eastern Ukraine. On 17 November 2022 the Court of The Hague delivered the verdict. Three of the four defendants, two Russians and one Ukrainian, were found guilty for having ordered, transported and guarded the alleged murder weapon. The Dutch Public Prosecution Service stated on 8 February 2023 that it had not been possible to find out who fired the missile, who gave the order to shoot and why this was done. The Dutch however are convinced that the perpetrators are hiding out in circles of the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade from Kursk, Russia. A Buk anti-aircraft system from that brigade, including a crew, is said to have crossed the border with Ukraine on 17 July 2014 and fired the fatal missile on the same day. None other than Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have given the green light for the use of this murder weapon in eastern Ukraine.
For years I studied the MH17 case. I attended or watched all court hearings and relevant press conferences, interviewed dozens of people, read over a thousand reports, documents and news articles in all languages. I even went as far as to enter a Buk-Telar to study its control panels. In February 2022 I published my initial findings in a book. In 2024 I will publish a follow-up. It again will be in Dutch. By popular demand I’m now starting this weekly newsletter for the English language community. If you like it, I invite you to subscribe.
You might find the downing of MH17 is a slam-dunk case. I understand. But I don’t. I think it is stranger than fiction. This is what you and I are supposed to believe:
An anti-aircraft device is smuggled into Ukraine from Russia in the early morning of July 17, 2014. The installation, called Buk-Telar, contains Russian military personnel who have been trained for a year or more to operate the weapon. This in itself is not something very hard to believe, but hold on! After crossing the border, the Buk is placed on a flatbed trailer of a Volvo truck to drive it to its destination: the front line near the strategic height of Saur-Mogila in the rebel-held Donetsk province. The Ukrainian army and separatists are engaged in bitter fighting there. The Russian Buk is to provide the separatists with the air support they have asked for. With the anti-aircraft units at their disposal, including the shoulder-operated Strela-3, they can't get further than 3.5 kilometers. Too low, in other words, for high-flying fighters of the Ukrainian Air Force. A Buk can hit targets up to twenty kilometers high.
A great risk is taken with the transportation of the Buk. It takes place in broad daylight. A bomb on it from a fighter plane or a missile from an anti-tank weapon - and this Buk is history. Agents of the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU know that the Buk is on its way and where it is going. They learned this through phone calls from the separatists that they overheard on July 16 and 17. They are also closely monitoring the transport. Along the route taken by the truck carrying the Buk, observers with cameras are set up. As early as the morning of July 17, when the Buk is still in Donetsk, the first photo is taken and reports of a military transport appear on social media. Yet the Ukrainians make no attempt to prevent the Buk from being transported to an area where sixteen of their military aircraft have already been shot down, and over a hundred commercial planes also fly over it daily.
Arriving at its destination, an agricultural field near the hamlet of Pervomaiskyi, a few kilometers south of the town of Snizhne, the Buk's crew must do without an accompanying radar car and command vehicle. This doesn’t feel very secure. Usually, it is the colleagues in the radar car who signal enemy targets and it is the commander of the command vehicle who gives the order to fire. Nevertheless, the Buk's equipment is sufficient to determine the speed and altitude of targets. Fighters and transport aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force fly much lower than passenger aircraft. Fighters also fly at a lower speed and make different flight movements. The size of the dot on the Buk's radar screen can also tell whether something is a fighter or not.
Two hours after arriving at Pervomaiskyi, the crew of the Buk-Telar launches a missile, aimed at the first object they see approaching. Things then go terrible wrong. The crew quickly realizes they mistook a commercial airliner, that was flying at ten kilometers altitude at high-speed heading straight for the Russian border, for an enemy target. The plane disintegrates before it hits the ground. All 298 occupants are killed.
Never had a shot been fired from a Buk rig during the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The first shot immediately leads to a disaster of epic proportions.
So much for the "official" reading of the story about the Malaysian Boeing 777 that was shot down over Ukrainian war zone on July 17, 2014 on the Amsterdam - Kuala Lumpur route, just before it was to enter Russian airspace.
What if there had never been a flight MH17 and therefore no MH17 disaster? What if the story as we all know it about MH17 had sprung from the imagination of a thriller author or screenwriter? Military analysts then would probably have dismissed it as unrealistic. The Buk-Telar is a valuable and fragile military asset. It would have been transported, after crossing the border, to the front line over 200 kilometers in broad daylight. One normally would do something like that at night. One usually doesn't announce something like that over the phone if one knows the enemy is wiretapping. The separatists had specially secured telephones that would not allow eavesdropping. Surely, they would have used them?
Also hard to imagine: a commander of the Russian air defense allowing one of his installations to be deployed in a location where passenger planes fly in and out - and then also without the guidance of a Buk radar car and command post. Equally miraculous: the crew of a Telar taking down a passenger plane on the assumption that it is an enemy target... after a year or more of intensive training... two hours after arriving on the scene... upon firing the first shot.... As for the Ukrainians, surely, they would have acted immediately if they knew that an anti-aircraft system was being brought in that endangered their air force? On the night of July 15-16, they had launched another airstrike on a separatists' convoy moving between Snizhne and Torez. But on July 17, they would have stood idly by as a convoy carrying a Buk Telar traveled over 200 kilometers across Ukrainian territory toward the front?
Unfortunately, a commercial aircraft did get shot down in eastern Ukraine, and the leading story of how that happened is the story of the lone Buk-Telar from Russia that was delivered with crew - and which immediately upon arrival in a war zone fired a missile that took the lives of 298 air travelers. The first to say it happened like this were the Ukrainian and American authorities. Dutch authorities followed suit. The official story about MH17 may still sound so implausible because of a string of blunders allegedly committed, but that does not make it false. People sometimes make errors of judgment beyond imagination. The history books are also full of unfortunate coincidences. But, as the American astronomer Carl Sagan stated, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." If you have an unlikely story to tell, you must come up with strong evidence to convince people that it really happened that way. Is this evidence really there? Is it convincing? Is it conclusive? What are the facts? What is fiction?
I invite you to take note of all the information I have collected and analyzed. I will then leave it to you to judge what really happened.
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