You do realize the people trying to blame the rebels for covering up facts could also be counted as pure conspiracy nutters? I know people here haven’t been following the conflict in detail, but at least to me it the following is apparent (from Russian speaking forums in the last months):
1. The rebels do not have a state-like structure and everything is extremely disorganized; no central command to speak of.
2. The rebels right now are being VERY hard pressed and fighting for their lives; the UA is outnumbering them something like 5:1 or 10:1.
3. The crash site is something like 10-20 square kilometers. They simply do not have the required people to secure the site assuming they had the good will to do so. Every fighter they could muster is right now trying to prevent Donetsk being cut off from Lugansk.
3.1 Hence impossible to stop marauders; moreover, an Ipad will cost more than 2-4 monthly pensions of a villager who probably did not receive any money in the last 2-3 months of fighting.
4. There are no rescue services to speak of – hence I doubt they have any significant number of people looking for the black boxes. Moreover, reports where said black boxes would end up are very confusing and often not citing actual sources – hence you could cherry pick what you want to report based on your agenda.
5. The Ukrainian government complained about tampering evidence because rebels had started to remove bodies. This is completely insane – the temperature in the region is 35C and the bodies were scattered over populated villages – could you imagine what would happen to the bodies if left in such heat over the course of a week before investigators actually get to the scene?
6. Overall, both sides have been blatantly lying in the conflict so far and now the BBC and company are reporting every possible allegation Poroshenko could come up with. It is stupid from the simple perspective that both rebels and UA have been living in parallel universes compared to ours in the media arena. No one actually bothers to go and properly report what is going on.
6.1 About lying – there have been clips of UA Buks in the region (denied by the UA but also shown the previous days on mass media), also clips of how rebels capture a TELAR (also denied by UA). So for the life of me, I would not trust either rebel or Ukrainian Army information.
In the end of the day, at least my hypothesis is that the likelihood of rebels shooting down the plane versus UA doing it is something like 70:30. That being said, the UA is criminally responsible for not notifying the rest of the world its high performance SAMs were captured (not done for propaganda purposes) and keeping planes routed over a war zone (which is essentially also denied for propaganda purposes – officially this is anti terrorist operation, not war) where an An-26 was shot down allegedly (not 100% sure myself) above MANPAD range. Mind you, this was claimed to have been done by a Russian Air Force plane but the tune changed the moment the Boeing went down.
As for the rebels – they are being severely bombed and target anything that flies. No command structure, not much training (a lot of former military volunteers with unknown experience). If they shot the airplane it was probably done by mistake and because of overly zealous operators lacking any situational awareness. IMHO it would have been completely preventable if Ukraine was actually honest about its losses (SAMs and An-26 included) and had taken prompt action to reroute airliners.
That being said, the media is completely insane on both sides – without ANY evidence what exactly happened accusations on both sides have grown to the point where the truth has become irrelevant. If I can paraphrase the Inhabited Island by Strugatsky – “nice and educated people, but when the anti-ballistic missile towers are turned on, they go completely crazy”.
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