Conspiracies exist. But seeing them everywhere is madness. The world is more complicated than that. And open attempts to influence opinion, via conventional means, aren’t conspiracies. Nor are they what that website rants about.

Also, note that because of its prejudices the website we’re discussing is blind to real conspiracies.

Now, can we move on? Any sane person who reads that website will soon realise it’s run by nutjobs, & all time spent on it is wasted. We’ve wasted too much bandwidth on it already.

+1

The BBC news website reports that the preliminary report by the MH17 investigators will be published in about two weeks time. That matches a target date of late August to early September that I have heard.

I fully expect it to say that the plane was struck by a missile and subsequently crashed. I reckon it’s pretty unlikely that a preliminary report will have enough details to pin the blame precisely on one side or the other… Even though, personally, I am pretty convinced it was the rebels.

haavarla is right, let’s leave the Ukraine out of this thread. My mistake for replying to that particular point. Mea culpa.

Keep in mind that the Russian Army today still has a tank reserve of 12.500 MBTs and 16.500 APCs

You could probably go from the drawing board to full production of a brand new attack helicopter design in the time it would take Russia to bring 12,500 tanks out of reserve and into theatre :p

We need a vote: which of these looks most like a viable aircraft?

The sad thing about this whole episode is that most BUK vehicles have not just an independent radar, but a secondary electro-optical telescope to zoom in on the target for visual confirmation. I think the whole episode reeks of amateurish warrior wannabes trying to bag the big one. And unfortunately a cut rate airline service decided to take a calculated risk to save a few farthings. It went south quickly from there.

Amateurish and tragic – especially for those who have lost loved ones and family. However, the electro-optical targeting system would only be useful if visibility was good. I’m not saying I know it was overcast, just that it is possible.

Further to what Paralay said. A well-standing member from acig.org (IIAF-JSF) advanced the following: allegedly a ukr. Su-25 was indeed shot down by a VVS MiG-29 from Millerovo on the 16th of July (this is what the ukr. government claimed, that the Su-25 was shot down not by novs. Buk but by the VVS). After that the ukrs. were keeping fully armed Su-27s on alert flying BARCAP and HAVCAP, and providing “security” to the airliners similar to the Sochi olympics f.e., which matched the spanish controller’s claim of 2 fighters escorting or following MH-17 until 2 or 3 minutes before the shoot-down. He believes the novs. could have thought the Sukhois might be escorting a high-value target and fired at it, however how about this: what if one of the Sukhois accidentally fired a missile (or even more)? How many times these kinds of inadvertent shoot-downs happened in the past?

Oh and come to think of it, regarding what the controller said: according to him MH17 was followed (or escorted) by the fighters until 2 or 3 minutes before it “disappeared from the radar” (his words). This is puzzling in that even if hit, it’s possible the B777 might not have disappeared from radar straight away, it would take a while to descend and disappear below the radar horizon (or disintegrate? any sort of evidence whether it spiraled down in more or less one piece- maybe minus one wing as paralay suggests, or it disintegrated before impact to the ground?). So why did the fighters disengaged? One possible variant is that they noticed on their RWRs being painted. Or it could be they disengaged after the hypothetical accidental launch of an AAM?

That all seems to be based on two pieces of hearsay:

1) a Su-25 was indeed shot down by a VVS MiG-29 (according to someone on ACIG) and subsequently UkrAF started escorting civilian airliners (something that in itself might have been deemed newsworthy enough to appear somewhere but hasn’t)

and

2) that there was a Spanish air controller who tweeted everything he is said to have tweeted.

Neither of these seem, to me, to be very convincing foundations on which to start building assumptions.

The rebels themselves claim to have used a Buk system captured from the Ukrainian army.