Did the Ukrainian Air Force use passenger planes as human shields? Is this what caused the downing of flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine?
On June 18, 2014, a video appeared on YouTube of a young woman in uniform, armed with a machine gun, who introduced herself as Elena from the city of Slaviansk. She said she joined the rebel People's Army in Donbass because of the daily bombardments by the Ukrainian army and the serious consequences this has had for the city's residents. “There was an incident recently,” she says. “A passenger plane flew past and a Ukrainian fighter jet hid behind it. Then it flew at a slightly lower altitude and dropped bombs on a residential area in the city of Seminivka. Then it took off again and again hid behind the passenger plane and disappeared.”
“They wanted to provoke the militia to shoot at the passenger plane,” Elena concludes. “This would have caused a catastrophe of world proportions. Civilians would have died. Then they would say terrorists did it. But there are no terrorists here. Only ordinary people standing up to defend their city.”
So a month later, what Elena had warned about happened: a passenger plane was shot down, and possibly exactly in the way Elena feared: with a missile intended for a Ukrainian fighter plane that was using flight MH17 as a human shield.
The story of the woman, Elena Kolenkina, was confirmed by MH17 suspect Igor Girkin on February 6, 2015. During his interrogation by Russian authorities, he said that around June 15, 2014, the head of the air defense of Slaviansk, a man named Groza, had reported to him about a Ukrainian four-engine civilian plane that had been spotted at an altitude of two kilometers above Semyonovka, a suburb of Slaviansk. As this plane flew over positions of the militia, a Su-25 suddenly appeared from a higher altitude. He bombed the rebels and then quickly climbed up, “sheltering, as it were, behind this plane”. If the air defenses had fired back, there would have been a good chance that the civilian plane would have been hit, Girkin understood. Slaviansk's air defense had MANPADS, so-called Iglas, which had been captured from the Ukrainians. When detecting multiple targets, this air defense system would automatically focus on the largest target. That would have been the civilian plane.
From a confidential document of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) published on Bonanza Media, it appears that it was widely believed in separatist circles that the Ukrainians were using passenger planes as human shields. “Telephone conversations show that they thought military aircraft were flying near civilian aircraft to be safe,” Dutch prosecutor Maartje Nieuwenhuis said during a JIT meeting on January 25, 2018.
On September 27, 2012, just two years before the disaster, a photographer from the French news agency AFP, Sergey Supinsky, took two photos of a Ukrainian Su-25 during a military exercise near the city of Zhytomyr. It is clearly visible how the fighter plane crosses the path of a higher flying commercial aircraft. The photos perfectly illustrate how risky such a situation must have looked for the crew of an anti-aircraft installation.
The JIT, which led the criminal investigation into the disaster, had not investigated the human shield scenario, the Dutch lawyers of Russian MH17 suspect Oleg Pulatov noted on June 22, 2020. “There was no investigation into whether the airspace was not fully was closed because of the use of civil aviation as a human shield [...] If the suspicion were true that the Ukrainian air force used passenger planes as a human shield, then it would be a war crime.” The court in The Hague allowed the lawyers to question three people about the human shield scenario: an employee of the Dutch Royal Army specialized in air defense systems (expert witness G9081); a representative of the Russian Buk manufacturer Almaz-Antey (Mikhail Malyshevski ) and a former commander of a Ukrainian Buk battalion (a certain gentleman by the name of Tarankov). These interrogations, minus the interrogation of G9081 that was cancelled for unknown reasons, took place out of sight of the cameras in the courtroom. The two expert witnesses were heard behind closed doors by the examining magistrate. What emerged from this? During their rejoinder of June 2022, the lawyers limited themselves to stating that Tarankov had stated that the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense is trained for situations in which fighter jets use passenger aircraft as human shields. This is to prevent accidents from happening. It is not known whether the lawyers also asked him whether Ukrainian fighter pilots are trained in using passenger planes as human shields.
The Public Prosecution Service emphasized that the separatists must have been aware of the danger of deploying a Buk-Telar in an area over which passenger planes flew. The Public Prosecution Service reported at the hearing of December 22, 2021 that there are several recorded telephone conversations in which separatists reported that they had seen civilian aircraft in the sky with their own eyes. At the start of the MH17 trial, Pulatov's lawyers emphasized that the case file shows that some separatists believed that the airspace was completely closed to civil aviation. However, they did not say whether the file also states when the separatists thought this. That impression may have arisen after July 14, 2014. On that day, Ukraine issued an airspace restriction at FL320. 'FL' stands for Flight Level – and '320' stands for 32,000 feet. Flying lower than 32,000 feet (9.7 kilometers) was no longer allowed, with the result that passenger planes flew higher, making them less visible from the ground.
Ukraine restricted its airspace after an Antonov military transport plane was shot down on July 14, according to Ukrainian authorities at an altitude of 6.2 or 6.5 kilometers. The airspace had already been restricted once before, on June 6, due to shelling by military aircraft. It was then determined that passenger aircraft were not allowed to fly lower than 7.9 kilometers (FL260). However, the Public Prosecution Service stated on December 22, 2021 that despite the restriction of the airspace on July 14, civil aviation continued to fly very low after that date. An Australian photojournalist reportedly testified to the JIT that she took cover somewhere between Torez and Donetsk on the afternoon of July 16, 2014, until she heard from militia fighters that it was a civilian plane and that they saw civilian planes flying over every day. When one of them looked in the sky at that plane with his binoculars, she allegedly took pictures of it. The Public Prosecution Service did not say which photojournalist it was. The author of this article asked two Australian photojournalists whether they are the source of this remarkable story, namely Ella Pellegrini and Kate Louise Geraghty. They answered in the negative. Both also say they know of no other Australian photojournalist who stayed in the area in the days surrounding the crash.
As recently as February 2020, Russia accused Israel of using passenger planes as human shields during their attacks on Syrian targets. The 172 occupants of a Syrian passenger plane reportedly narrowly escaped death when Syrian anti-aircraft fire opened on Israeli warplanes that were in the vicinity of the aircraft, The Times of Israel reported on Feb. 7, 2020. In 1980, an Italian passenger plane, Flight 870, was shot down by an air-to-air missile intended for a Libyan fighter plane. How this could have gone so terribly wrong has never been officially established, but according to several serious sources, including ex-President of Italy Francesco Cossiga who cites information from Italian intelligence officers, the fighter plane used Flight 870 as a human shield. The missile that is said to be launched by a French fighter jet hit the Italian plane while trying to bring down the Libyan jet.
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