Shootdown [S1Ep14]

It was turning out to be a bad year for Malaysia Airlines 777s

Last week we discussed the route the plane would likely have taken had it traveled north. Its endpoint would have been in central Kazakhstan, a client state of Russia. In that context, it’s interesting to note that three men with Russian names were aboard the plane. One was a passenger from Russia, Nikolai Brodsky. The two were two Ukrainians, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak.

A little online research turned up a fair bit of information about Brodsky. The Russian media contacted his family and interviewed his wife. He seemed like a fairly high-profile guy. He ran a timber company in Irkutsk and was active in a dive club that in the winter cut holes into the frozen surface of Lake Baikal and scuba dived under the ice. The reason that he was on the plane was that his club was on a ten-day drip to go scuba diving in Bali, and he was coming back early. There two different reasons given for why he was coming back early; one was that he’d promised his wife that he’d have dinner with her on March 8, international Women’s Day; the other was that he had to go on a business trip to Mongolia.

There was much less information available at the time about the Ukrainians, as their relatives didn’t want to talk to the media. What we did know was that they had a furniture company called Nika Mebel. Mebel is the Russian word for “Furniture,” the men were joint owners of a furniture factory in Odessa. They didn’t have a store to sell their stuff but they had an online store that had gone live a few months before. There was no explanation given as to why they were on the plane.

By July 2014, Jeff had a tentative sense of possibility that something might be afoot with MH370. The Inmarsat data indicated that the plane had flown south, but there was at least a possibility that the data could have been tampered with. If it had been, then the plane had been taken to a Russian-controlled part of the world. And there were three Russian-speaking passengers on the plane.

There was no way Jeff wasn’t going to check out that possibility. So he reached out through some journalist connections in the region and hired researchers in Odess and Irkutsk.

On July 17, 2014, Jeff was in his kitchen when the phone rang. It was a producer from CNN asking if he could go on air to talk about the Malaysia Airlines 777 that had just gone down over Ukraine. He’d spent so much time thinking about Ukraine and MH370 that it took him a moment to realize that she was talking about a completelely different airplane.

The details were still sketchy, but it seemed that in the late afternoon, Ukraine time, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it had exploded in midair. Initial reports suggested it might have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over territory held by Russia-backed rebels.

A Malaysia Airlines 777. Ukraine. Russia. The echoes seemed too overwhelming to ignore. Boeing 777s are among the most reliable airplanes in the world; none had ever been lost mid-flight before. There were 15 Malaysia Airlines 777s at the start of 2014, out of some 18,000 registered aircraft in the world, and two had come to grief under mysterious circumstances in less than five months.

But on air at CNN, all the other aviation analysts agreed that of course the destruction of MH17 so soon after the loss of MH370 could only be a freak coincidence. What connection could there possibly be?

It was soon established that the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. A 150-pound shrapnel-laced warhead had torn open the aluminum airframe, scattering passengers and crew into the 500 mph slipstream. In most airplane crashes, the question is: what happened? This time, it was: who did it, and why?

The first clue emerged almost immediately, courtesy of Igor Girkin, the GRU colonel whose Reuters profile had taught me the concept of “active reserve.” An hour after the shootdown, Girkin had gloated over social media that the rebels had destroyed a Ukrainian military transport. Once it became clear that the plane was in fact a passenger jet, Girkin took down his post.

A consensus instantly gelled among Western experts. Girkin’s post meant that the rebels had shot down the plane by accident. Presumably they’d somehow gotten their hands on a captured missile launcher that they didn’t properly know how to use and thought they were firing it at an enemy military plane. Virtually every Western journalist, analyst, and government official agreed.

But not everyone. An Internet collective known as Bellingcat started digging deeper. Bellingcat specializes in what its volunteer members call “open source intelligence,” gathering information from social media to shed light on geopolitical issues. The loosely affiliated members have none of the academic or government credentials that generally underpin public credibility; the collective’s reputation rests on the transparency of their methodology.

Scouring Russian social media, the team gathered photos of the missile launcher that downed the plane as it drove to and from the shoot-down site. In the months that followed, they were able not only to precisely pin down its movements, but also identify where it came from and some of the officers involved in the mission.

They learned that on June 23, 2014, the 2nd Battalion of the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade left its base outside Kursk, Russia, driving south to the village of Millerovo, near the Ukraine border. Commanded by Lieutenant Dmitry Yuryevich Trunin, the battalion was equipped with a Buk medium-range surface-to-air missile system, including six missile launchers, three missile loaders, a command vehicle, and a Buk Snow Drift radar vehicle. Reaching Millerovo on June 25, the battalion encamped within five miles of an area of Ukraine controlled by separatists, and settled in. Three weeks later, on the night of July 16, one of the missile launchers, number 332, was hauled across the border and taken down the M4 highway to the rebel-held city of Donetsk. The next morning, it was brought to the village of Snizhne under the direction of GRU officer Sergey Dubinsky, then unloaded in an open field almost directly underneath a busy commercial aviation airway, L980. Over the next three hours, numerous commercial airliners flew overhead. Then MH17 approached. After Buk missile launcher 332 fired a missile and destroyed the plane, the launcher was filmed rolling back toward the Russian border with one missile missing.

The narrative pieced together by Bellingcat indicated that responsibility lay not with hapless militiamen but with Russia’s military chain of command, and ultimately the Kremlin itself. This interpretation was later bolstered by Girkin himself, who in August 2017 gave an interview to the Russian news website The Insider in which he was asked who was responsible for the shootdown of the Boeing. Girkin insisted that the militia had not shot down the plane, but also refused to say that Ukraine was responsible. That left only one possibility. “He's implying that Russian soldiers were in the Buk crew, not separatists,” says Bellingcat member Aric Toler.

Last year Girkin and two other high-ranking Russian officials were convincted in a Dutch court of murder in shooting down the plane and sentenced to life in prison, in absentia. Girkin is currently under arrest in Russia, apparently for insubordination, having been critical of Putin and the conduct of the war in Ukraine.

It’s hard to feel sorry for him.