[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]nrt wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]nrt wrote:
[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:
[quote]roybot wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Dr.Matt581 wrote:
[quote]roybot wrote:
Locating the Black Box would be a start…[/quote]
An actual investigation by non-biased personnel would help as well. As it stands, I would not trust any investigation done by Ukraine, Russia, and/or Separatists.[/quote]
Yeah right. It was shot down in separatist territory where several other aircraft have been shot down recently and a Cossack bragged about shooting down a plane shortly after it happened then deleted his post when the shit hit the fan.[/quote]
Anonymous guy posts bullshit on the internet? It must be true then.[/quote]
Exactly. Terrorist groups claim credit for stuff they didn’t actually do all the time. As of right now, there is no real evidence to implicate anybody at all.
Now that that has been said, when people start trying to pass off conjecture and hypothetical scenarios as facts in order to compare my homeland to Nazis in a serious manner as happened a couple of posts above I think it is time for me to find a new place to post. [/quote]
Sorry if I offended you; certainly wasn’t my intent. And I have enjoyed your posts on life in the USSR.
That said, I don’t think the parallel between Germany/Czechoslovakia or Germany/Poland in the 30’s and Russia/Ukraine today is at all far fetched. No, I don’t think Russia is going to go on to kill six million Jews, and I think it would be wrong to call Russians Nazis, but I do think the specific similarities are illuminating - even crucial - and can reasonably be brought up. Germany used the significant German minorities in smaller, neighbouring countries as a means of undermining and swallowing those countries, step by step (take a chunk, wait 6-12 months… take another, wait a bit more…). Russia is doing the same with the Russian population of the Ukraine. The Crimea was the first step, now the pressure is moving north. (It’s not for no reason that NATO has been doing some muted sabre-rattling WRT the Baltic States, all of which have significant Russian populations.) To say this is not to say that Russians are Nazis.
[/quote]
Two things:
First, Germany gobbed up German minorities after WWI because every people were supposed to have their own territory except, you guessed it, Germans.
Second, I dont think that Putin cares about the Ukraine or about the Russians in the Ukraine.
He needed Crimea to maintain and service his fleet in the Black Sea and that could have become problematic if the Ukraine had joined the EU down the road.
I think he is only stirring up trouble in the Eastern Ukraine to have a bargaining chip with the EU, he will back down eventually after the EU has “convinced him” to play ball, thus strenghtening the EU and further weakening the US.
Thus having aquired the reputation of someone who can be “reasoned with” the Crimea will soon be forgotten, the EU bureaucrats will blow sugar up their own asses because their words succeeded where US military might could not, the US will be sidelined when it comes to Russian/EU relations and the rest of the Ukraine can drift towards the EU because who gives a fuck.
It also should be clear that a SAM that takes a bird down at 32000 feet is not something you tinker together in your garage.
Who could possibly have the technology to supply such a weapon system?
And the extensive training to operate it efficiently?[/quote]
I disagree with you about Germany between the wars, and I’d like to believe you’re right about Putin (I don’t), but those are really conversations for another place.
As regards the cause of the accident, though, we should be looking for the simplest explanation that fits the evidence, and that’s that Russian-supplied weapons helping Russian-based separatists brought the plane down. Everything we know fits that scenario; I’m not aware of anything significant that doesn’t fit. The NYT had a good story today about how recent weeks have seen these separatists repeatedly shooting down planes and bragging about it online. For this plane, the pattern was repeated - until it was realised that this was a civilian airliner: then they suddenly claimed they didn’t do this one. D’oh! (SexMachine’s posts above are solid.)
Yes, there’s no PROOF yet, so we should reserve final judgment, but any other theory (some vast, elaborate Ukrainian conspirary? American conspiracy? Aliens?) is inherently implausible, and requires considerable imagination to make it fit what we know.
(Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador to the United States, on Twitter:
#MH17 Russian obfuscation out of same playbook they used after shooting down KAL 007 in 83. It took 10 years to get to the bottom of that.
�¢?? Christopher Meyer (@SirSocks) July 19, 2014)[/quote]
I think it was as a Russian weapon system with a Russian trained crew.
[/quote]
One question is whether the Russians gave them the system or whether they seized it from a Ukrainian base when they took over territory. Either way its a Russian system.