S2Ep3 Why Putin Went on the Offensive

A longtime Russia observer explains Russia's strategic aims

Why would Russia want to hijack a Malaysian airliner? It’s the question that almost everyone asks the first time they hear about the idea that MH370 had been vulnerable to a spoofing attack. It just seems intuitively outlandish.

But to understand why someone would do something, you have to understand how the world looks from their perspective. What pressures was Russia under in the late winter of 2014? What options did Vladmir Putin feel that he had open to him? What did he hope to achieve by launching a hybrid war against the West?

(Here let me point out that, whatever you think happened to MH370, it is certainly the case that Russia, and in particular the military intelligence agency referred to as the GRU, did begin waging an aggressive, worldwide campaign of assassination, hacking, and disinformation at around the time, so these questions are highly relevant to the general geopolitical situation regardless.)

To help me get inside Putin’s head I have a special guest with me on the show today. Melik Kaylan is an Istanbul-born, UK-raised polylingual journalist who has traveled and worked extensively in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and has been following the evolution of Russian policy for decades. I first met Melik socially soon after MH370 disappeared and he has been a constant font of insight into Russia’s worldview and modus operandi. A frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine, he recently published an article in Forbes about the Russia-Ukraine conflict that I highly recommend.

Due to the depth and subtlety of Melik’s insight today’s interview is a little longer than usual, but I think that viewers and listeners will find it invaluable in sharpening their understanding of Putin’s strategic motives. Two key takeaways are that, firstly, that the idea of uniting adjacent territories into a fraternally bound, Russo-centric empire is core to Putin’s conception of Russian identity, and second, that this conception was so threatened by what he perceived as Western incursions into the “near abroad,” and specifically Ukraine, that he had to switch from a merely defensive posture to one that took the fight to the enemy.

Last episode I added a new feature to the show, namely “Community Radar,” which is an attempt to address some of the more compelling issues that have arisen either in the comments section of YouTube or Substack, or have been raised directly with me over Twitter or  by email.

Today’s topic concerns Captain Zaharie’s flight simulator. In Episode 2.1 we went into a Cat D simulator to figure out what would happen if you isolated the electrical buses in a 777, as one would have to do in order to turn off the satcom from the flight deck. In the wake of the episode, viewers asked:, was there any sign of that with Zaharie’s simulator?

Remember, for many people the existence of Zaharie’s flight simulator is a smoking gun because it shows that a month before the plane disappearend Zaharie carried out a simulated flight up the Malacca Strait, and then took it into the remote Indian Ocean where he set the fuel to zero. It’s very suspicious.

But it’s also curious that what he simulated wasn’t the hard part of stealing MH370, namely going dark at IGARI and pulling a 180 before flying up the Malacca Strait. You’d think if you were planning an elaborate hijack, it’s exactly the hard parts you’d want to practice.

So the question is, can you isolate the left AC bus in Zaharie’s flight sim program, and if so does it show the data saved to the files found on Zaharie’s hard drive indicate that he tried to do this?

If so it would be highly damning.

Reader Mike Collins, who has a lot of experience with simulators and has recreated the exact setup of Zaharie’s rig, stepped forward and offered to conduct an experiment. Running his flight simulator in the same configuration as Zaharie’s, he isolated the electrical bus and then examined the backup files to see if they recorded that action in the data files. Unfortunately, they didn’t. So we just can’t tell from the Zaharie’s recovered flight sim files whether he did that or not.

Anyway, thank very much to Mike for delving into that. We didn’t get a clarifying answer, but it was worth the effort.