Thread by @mattia_n

8 years ago today a Russian operated surface-to-air Buk from the 53rd Air Defense Brigade, based outside of Kursk, shot down the civilian airliner #MH17 and murdered 298 innocent civilians, including 88 children, from a field south of Snizhne in Donetsk Oblast. /1

Shortly afterwards, Igor Girkin (Strelkov) announced that a Ukrainian An-26 was shot down near the town of Torez (since 2016 called Chystiakove nearby Snizhne) and shared pictures of smoke in the distance. /2

After it became clear that the Buk downed a civilian airliner, Girkin quickly removed his gloating post. /3

Since the first minutes after the tragedy, the Russians and their proxies have been floating the space with wild and contradictory conspiracy theories about the MH17 incident but failed to convince those who cared to look at the facts. /4

.@bellingcat meticulously investigated open sources (including pictures and videos of the system and satellite imagery) and tracked photos of the Buk launcher from Russia to occupied #Ukraine and back. /5
bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…

In 2020, Bellingcat and @the_ins_ru even identified Colonel General Andrey Ivanovich Burlaka of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) as the one who supervised the movement of weapons from Russia to Ukraine. /6
theins.ru/politika/216447

In 2019, the outlet produced a a very good podcast about their investigation that I - until today - recommend everyone to listen to. /7
bellingcat.com/resources/podc…

The open source investigations were later confirmed by the criminal investigations of the Joint Investigations Team (JIT).

In 2019, The Dutch Prosecution Service announced that it charges four suspects for downing MH17, including Igor Girkin. /8
prosecutionservice.nl/topics/mh17-pl…

While the judicial process grinds on, despite Russia’s unwillingness to cooperate, the EU’s High Representative wrote yesterday that the EU “expects Russia to accept its responsibility and to fully cooperate with efforts to establish accountability.” /9
consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press….

The downing of MH17 is a painful reminder that Russia’s war against #Ukraine started eight years ago and while the intensity flared up in 2014-15, it never became a truly frozen conflict. Until February 2022, about 14.000 people were killed in this senseless war. /10

On irritating comment on Girkin came from @MarkGaleotti in his podcast (Nr. 72), where he said that Girkin rather by inaction was responsible for the downing of MH17… /11
podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/in-…

and at ~11:50 of the podcast @MarkGaleotti says: “…it is worth stressing, the rebels when they used their Russian supplied surface-to-air missile didn’t know they were shooting down a civilian airliner.”

No Marc, the airliner was not downed by “rebels”… /12

but by professional Russian soldiers by the 53rd Air Defense Brigade from Kursk.

I would appreciate if you could correct that in future podcasts. I also take issue with your description of the origins of the Donbas war as a “toxic mix of foreign intervention and civil war” /13

but that is a separate issue, which is worth discussing but not on the anniversary of MH17. On this topic, I suggest Jakob Hauter’s comprehensive research, which comes to rather clear conclusions. /end
lehmanns.de/shop/sozialwis…