Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis by Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Author:Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Fired at from the air

The BUK narrative was challenged by opposing claims from the Russian Ministry of Defense that a Ukrainian SU-25 (some sources said two) had trailed MH17 (Escobar 2014b). The damaged MH17 starboard jet engine indicated a hit from an air-to-air missile, not a BUK. Not a single eyewitness had seen the graphic, thick, missile trace that would have been visible had a BUK been responsible (Escobar 2014b). This account was corroborated by a BBC report citing eyewitness accounts of villagers who had seen a fighter close to the airliner around the time of its crash and heard explosions coming from the sky. The BBC later removed the report from its archive (Whitney 2014g) but resuscitated its account for a 2016 documentary (Rudin 2016). Michael Bociurkiw, among the first OSCE inspectors to reach the crash site spent over a week examining the wreckage and described to CBC World News two or three “really pock-marked” pieces of fuselage. “It almost looks like machine gun fire; very, very strong machine gun fire that has left these unique marks that we haven’t seen anywhere else” (cited by Collins 2014a).

Despite Western sanctions and denunciations, a columnist for the World Socialist Web Site noted:

Washington has presented not one shred of evidence that Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile either fired by the anti-Kiev forces or supplied by Moscow. Instead, it has pointed to videos and audio recordings posted on YouTube by the Ukrainian intelligence agency, which is notorious for fabricating false charges against Russia. The vast US intelligence apparatus has produced no satellite photos, communications intercepts or anything else to back the allegations against the Putin government.

(Van Auken 2014b)

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