Killer in the Kremlin by John Sweeney
Author:John Sweeney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781529199666
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2022-07-20T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER ELEVEN
âSo, sir, do you regret the killings in Ukraine, sir?â
Dusk is falling. I am standing in an endless cornfield in the middle of nowhere in eastern Ukraine, the land rising and falling slowly like a calm sea, looking at the nose of a passenger jet and plane seats and Air Malaysia logos and bodies in black bags being dumped in the back of a bin lorry. Paperbacks and bits of plane seats and luggage and Trunkis, those little wheelie suitcases that you pull a toddler along on, litter the ground. And every time I see a kid on one of those at Heathrow or Gatwick, I get a flashback and I start to cry.
I am being filmed by Darius Bazargan, a shooter-producer and a good friend. Weâve been in some tough places together but this is the worst by a long chalk. Generally, I can talk the front and back legs off a donkey but right now I am struggling to find some words that make any sense. We got here late and most of the corpses have been located and placed in body bags. As we stand, I count six body bags being loaded into the back of a lorry. The light is dying and I need to come up with words. Darius shoots some B-roll: a womanâs red hat with a black band, a kidâs black-and-white monkey, a part of the airframe bearing the words âImpact Resistant Door.â
And then the words pour out: âMH17 came from the west, where the sun is setting over there, from Amsterdam, heading east to Malaysia, and then the lives of nearly 300 people were extinguished.â
Down the hill it gets worse. Here, the mighty aero-engines and the landing gear fell to earth, the ground burnt black, the air thick. I tell the camera: âYou canât see it but the whole place stinks. It stinks of aviation fuel. It stinks of the dead. This is a monstrous crime.â
The Boeing was shot down on 17 July 2014 by a Russian BUK surface-to-air missile. What happens is the missile flies up at 3,500 miles per hour and rides alongside the target, then explodes, firing hundreds of metal golfball-sized bomblets into the enemy fuselage. The kinetic power of a plane flying at 500 miles per hour does the rest. The rocket-launcher is carried on a primary flatbed truck which tows a massive radar behind it. This particular BUK had been shipped across from Russia to eastern Ukraine into the hands of Putinâs proxy pro-Moscow fighters via a pontoon bridge. The whole BUK unit, flatbed, rocket and radar was too heavy for the pontoon bridge so the Russian Army left the radar on the east bank. That degraded their ability to tell the difference between a Ukrainian fighter jet and a passenger jet full of holidaymakers. The soldiers thought they were killing the enemy. Instead, they killed 298 people, Dutch, Malaysians, Australians, British.
Down the track, I got to interview the Dutch far-right politician, Geert Wilders. I asked
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