One Year Later, Russia Still Spinning Shooting MH17 out of Sky

It has been one year since Soviet loyalists shot MH 17 out of the sky killing over Ukraine with a BUK missile. Reuters has a summary background here.

Since that time, Russia has denied any involvement while only recently has Putin referred to a ‘kinda-sorta’ maybe position.

From WSJ in part: MOSCOW—Russian President Vladimir Putin says he won’t accept a proposal for the U.N. Security Council to set up a criminal tribunal over the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, casting doubt on the prospect of bringing those responsible to justice under international law.

In a phone call Thursday with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Mr. Putin called the proposal “untimely and counterproductive,” according to a Kremlin statement. He said a “thorough and objective” international investigation had to finish before countries took any decisions on how to punish those guilty of the crime.

Russia holds a veto in the U.N. Security Council, giving it the final say on any of the council’s efforts. A year after the crash in eastern Ukraine, there are other avenues to pursue a prosecution, but the challenges are deep.

There were cell phone videos that were taken by the ‘separatists’ and they have finally surfaced telling a disgusting story.

From Buzzfeed: Two days after MH17 was shot down over east Ukraine — turning a simmering separatist conflict into a crisis of global proportions — the crash site remains a hideous mess that will make it harder for investigators to establish what happened — and for relatives to get peace. As Ukraine, Russia, and Moscow-backed rebels trade barbs over which side fired the missile that brought the Boeing 777 jet down, the bodies of the 298 passengers and crew killed instantaneously were still strewn across a field, decomposing in the 85-degree heat.

 Nobody seemed to know where the bodies would be taken. Ukraine wants them stored 185 miles north in Kharkiv, the only nearby city with the facilities to take them, but claims that rebels have already spirited 38 corpses to their nearby stronghold in Donetsk and conducted their own autopsies. With the wreckage from the crash spread out over a 10-square-mile radius, the many bodies still at the scene may fare worse. Ukraine claims to have found 186, and BuzzFeed counted 82 in Hrabove alone, many of them unmoved since the crash. Local firemen and police officers, some of whom had clearly spent the night drinking moonshine, listlessly shoveled body parts into black garbage bags and left them to broil at the roadside.

In part from Australia: The plane was shot down during a bout of heavy fighting last year between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists, sparking global condemnation.

Kiev and the West point the finger at the separatists, saying they may have used a BUK surface-to-air missile supplied by Russia. But Moscow denies involvement and instead accuses Ukraine’s military.

A criminal probe by a joint investigation team consisting of Australian, Belgian, Dutch, Malaysian and Ukrainian detectives is currently underway.

The five countries have also asked the United Nations Security Council to establish an international criminal tribunal to try those responsible for crimes connected to the plane’s downing.