Did Flight 17 die to save Ukraine?

The Dutch report is unequivocal: on 17 July, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was criminally shot down by Putin’s KGB junta.

The day before, the 9M38 BUK missile that killed 283 passengers and 15 crew had been moved from Russia into Pervomaisky, the village controlled by ‘Ukrainian separatists’ (the Putinesque for Russian paramilitaries). After the missile was fired, the launcher went back into Russia.

The investigators interviewed 200 witnesses, analysed 150,000 intercepted phone calls and gathered 500,000 photos and videos to reach their verdict: there’s no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that the responsibility for the crime rests with the Russians.

Now, anyone aware of how such decisions are made in Russia will know that the missile wouldn’t have been launched without Putin’s explicit order. The Russians can lie all they want, and they’ve been doing that for two years, but whodunit is no longer the question.

Even Putin’s press secretary Peskov inadvertently let it slip that the findings “may be true”. By KGB standards, that’s a resounding mea culpa.

But one critical question still hasn’t been answered, nor even asked: Why? Actually, it isn’t one such question but several.

Why did the KGB junta openly brand itself as evil? Why did its leaders risk prosecution at the Hague tribunal? Why did they use the BUK modification that only the Russian army has? Why did they fire from their controlled terrain?

Here we enter the area of conjecture, but it isn’t very difficult, given the facts and general understanding of how the KGB works. They may not always do things for a good reason, but they always try.

What did they have to gain by shooting down an airliner full of Dutchmen? If they wanted to blame it on the Ukraine, why didn’t they use the older BUK modification the Ukrainians have and fire from some terrain nominally under Ukrainian control?

A mistake must have been made. The Russians clearly wanted to bring down some airplane, for otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. But Flight 17 wasn’t their intended target.

What was? There were no Ukrainian warplanes in the area and, even if there had been, the Russians wouldn’t have needed that charade to fire at them. They had been doing that for weeks, openly and without using BUKs.

The solution to this puzzle is simple for people who understand the evil ways of totalitarian regimes, those serving as Col. Putin’s role models. A bit of history is in order.

On 31 August, 1939, the SS launched a false flag raid on a Gleiwitz radio station in Silesia. They shot up the premises and left behind some corpses dressed in Polish uniforms. This was used as a pretext for invading Poland the next day.

The Nazis’ Soviet allies were suitably inspired. Following their criminal pact with Hitler, the Soviets occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic republics, Bessarabia and, while at it, even Bukovina, which went beyond the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Then came Finland’s turn, and there the Soviets knew they’d run into some resistance. And, unlike their other victims, Finland was likely to have allies possibly and sympathisers definitely. Sweden could be expected to be displeased, and even Britain was making threatening noises.

Hence, just like the Nazis in Poland, the Soviets were desperate for a casus belli against Finland. Mercifully, the Nazi patent was in the public domain.

On 26 November, 1939, the Red Army shelled its own post at Mainila, on the Finnish border. The Soviets declared that the fire had come from Finland and therefore they were victims of a heinous aggression. That defied not only logic but also physics. It was easy to establish that the shells had come from the south, not north: shell fragments disperse in the direction of the trajectory vector.

In March, April, 1940, the Soviets executed 20,000 Polish officers and high-ranking officials at Katyn and elsewhere. Again false flag methods were used: the murderers used German-made Walther handguns. When the corpses were dug up, the Soviets blamed the massacre on the Germans and persisted in that lie for the next 50 years.

Another false flag operation brought Putin to power in 2000. The FSB/KGB blew up several blocks of flats in Russia and blamed the crime on the Chechens. That kicked off the second Chechen war and adumbrated the entry of the strong leader so admired by Messrs Trump, Hitchens, Booker et al.

This circuitous route brings us back to Flight 17, which clearly wasn’t the intended BUK target. Another plane was.

Indeed there was such a plane overflying the area, a Russian airliner with a profile similar to that of the MA’s Boeing 777. It must have been the real target, in a false flag operation similar to those I’ve outlined.

Had the op succeeded, Putin would have had his casus belli for invading the Ukraine without having to resort to the subterfuge of ‘separatists’. And, since the downed airliner would have been Russian, it would have been Russian investigators on the scene.

While Putin’s tanks rolled towards Kiev, the ‘investigators’ would have hastily concluded that Russia had no choice: Ukrainian ‘fascists’ had to pay for their crime. As it was, the tanks didn’t roll: Putin got cold feet imagining the ensuing global outrage.

Watching him squirm in the Hague dock would be a pleasing sight to all decent people, which category obviously doesn’t include the new UKIP leader Diane James, who describes the KGB colonel as one of her “political heroes”.

Don’t count on my vote, Madam.