The Dutch Security Council has completed its investigation without naming the culprits in the downing of the Malaysian MH17 airliner.
Hooray! The Russians are rejoicing. The Council! Did not! Say! Who did it! That means only two things, as far as Vlad is concerned: 1) the Russians didn’t do it, and 2) the Ukie fascists did.
No Russian will wonder who goes by that name. By now the message has been repeated often enough and loudly enough for every TV watcher to know that every Ukrainian is a fascist agent of the CIA, FBI, EU and Mossad.
As an aside, this thundering propaganda of wholesale ethnic hatred hasn’t been seen in Russia since the Second World War, when all Germans were portrayed as subhuman sadists. Subsequent enemies were identified by their presumptive crimes, not nationality.
Hence mandated hatred was to be directed at American imperialists, not Americans; British colonialists, not Englishmen; Zionists or cosmopolitans, not Jews; Hungarian hirelings of Wall Street, not Hungarians; Czech revisionists, not Czechs. In each case the connotation was clear enough, but the denotation remained ideological, not ethnic.
But hey, who says Vlad has to follow blindly the path trodden by his admired predecessors, such as Stalin? Who says he isn’t capable of creative development?
No one. Certainly no one who follows Vlad’s propaganda. So it’s not just the Poroshenko government that’s fascist, but every Ukie. They are all Russia haters red in tooth and claw.
And what coloured the Ukies’ teeth and claws red was the blood of MH17’s 283 passengers and 15 crew. That’s the only inference one can possibly draw from the Dutch report.
Here one has to observe with some sadness that attention to detail, especially procedural detail, isn’t one of the most salient talents the Russians possess. The detail they ignore in this case is that this phase of the investigation was purely technical.
The Council wasn’t out to point accusing fingers – this will be done in February by the international board of inquiry. The Council’s task was merely to establish what brought the plane down.
So it did. MH17 was shot down not by a Ukrainian or American fighter plane (as has been mooted in the Russian press) but by an AA missile fired from a Russian-made Buk system.
Ukrainian loyalists have those in their arsenal too, but here’s the rub: MH17 was hit by the latest Buk modification that’s the exclusive property of the Russian military. Only these latest missiles contain in their warheads the butterfly-shaped shrapnel found in the victims’ bodies.
Moreover, the report outlined the area of 360 square kilometres, within which the guilty Buk was sited. Here’s another rub: that whole area was at the time in the hands of ‘Ukrainian separatists’, which is the Russian PC term for the bands of Putin’s proxy troops.
That makes the naming of culprits redundant. Russia’s guilt is as good as proved, something that the February inquiry will certainly confirm.
The cynic in me suspects that Putin’s bombing raids on Syria were timed to coincide with the release of this report. He knew what the findings would be and, with the instinct of the ‘common Petersburg thug’ (Vlad’s own self-description) realised a diversion was necessary to draw the world’s attention from murdered passengers.
One hopes that not everyone’s attention will be thus diverted. For it’s the tragic fate of MH17 that turned Western opinion against Vlad. None of his previous crimes had had enough resonance to muffle the admiring noises emanating from the latest generation of ‘useful idiots’ in the West.
The KGB junta fronted by Vlad attacked Chechnya and Georgia, annexed the Crimea along with large portions of the Ukraine’s territory – and still he remained a great leader in Nigel Farage’s eyes.
It murdered, roughed up or imprisoned hundreds of Vlad’s political opponents, with some ‘whacked’ with nuclear weapons in the middle of London – and Hitchens, Booker and other useful idiots still kept their panegyrics going.
But the criminal downing of MH17 – and let’s face it, everyone knew from the start who did it – was a step too far, especially since most of its passengers were Western. Had they all been Malaysian, our conscience wouldn’t have flamed so bright, but killing Westerners is where we draw the line.
Not too thick a line, mind you, for the panegyrics didn’t stop, and Vlad is still depicted in some circles as a strong leader, patriot, defender of traditional values and the last bulwark of Christianity, rather than the KGB murderer he is.
But enough of a line was drawn for the modest sanctions to stay in place, and Russia to be increasingly seen as a pariah state, albeit not without redeeming qualities. Therefore, when the inevitable conclusion is published in February, some more diversion will be in order, and the more spectacular the better.
Call me selfish, but I only hope that Vlad won’t choose London for his target practice. Or Paris, where I have many friends. Or Israel, where I have friends too. Or America, where I have both friends and family.
I could almost forgive him Brussels – especially the part where the EU HQ is. It’s Rue de la Loi, Vlad, just south of that wedding-cake square. Can’t miss it.