NO surprises here, just confirmation putin and the Russian people who recently voted to extend his totalitarian dictatorship and their rebel proxies in the Ukraine are guilty of the murder of the passengers and crew of MH17. A moral nation would express some shame, would apologize, would work with the investigators to expose who gave the order to fire the BUK missile and turn them over to The Netherlands or Malaysia or the Ukraine for prosecution. You can be sure everyone who had any part in the downing of MH17 is in Russia, protected, and I am sure, honored by putin and his henchmen. The rest of the world has a moral obligation to tighten the existing sanctions on Putin and Russia and to impose even more sanctions on them. putin and Russia are promoting, supporting, and participating in state sponsored terrorism in the Ukraine, in Syria, in Georgia, and threatening it against the Baltic States, Armenia, and Eastern Europe. They are no better than daesh / isis, hezbollah, boko haram, al-qaeda, hamas, no better than the world's terrorist rogue nations, n korea, saudi arabia and Iran. And keep this in mind, donald titus drumpf/trump is a great admirer of putin and the russian dictatorship. From +NPR.....
Flight MH17 Was Shot Down By Missile Moved From Russia, Investigators Say
A Dutch-led team of international investigators has concluded that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which crashed in July 2014, was shot down by a Russian Buk missile that had been transferred into rebel-held eastern Ukraine.
After the shooting, the surface-to-air missile launcher was transferred back to Russia.
The crash of MH17 killed all 298 people aboard. The preliminary results of the international criminal investigation were announced on Wednesday in the Netherlands. Investigators said they were confident about the type of weapon used and where it was fired from — but that the investigation into who exactly was responsible for the missile launch will take more time.
There are more than 100 suspects, investigators say. The next phase of the investigation will involve interviewing suspects and tracing the chain of command within the separatists in Ukraine, to identify who gave the order to fire the missile.
An earlier investigation by the Dutch Safety Board had already concluded that the crash was the result of a missile launched from a region in Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists. Earlier this year, a report from a group of volunteer citizen journalists had implicated Russia in the missile launch.
Russia has repeatedly denied sending military equipment and personnel across the border into Ukraine. Moscow has previously suggested that MH17 might have been shot down by another plane.
Now Russia maintains that if the plane were brought down by a surface-to-air missile, it must have been fired from somewhere other than the rebel-held areas identified by investigators, Reuters reports. The Kremlin said, before the Wednesday report's findings were announced, that it has new radio-location data that show the missile couldn't have been fired from rebel territory.
Published on Sep 28, 2016
Press presentation JIT MH17 28-09-2016
The report from the Joint Investigation Team, which consisted of investigators from the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia, Malaysia and Ukraine, used forensic data, witness accounts and intercepted phone calls to determine the weapon used and the location of the missile launch.
Fragments of a Buk missile were found at the crash site, including a piece of metal lodged in the frame of a cockpit window, investigators say.
They said that phone calls showed pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine requesting that the surface-to-air missile system be delivered and reporting its arrival from Russia, and that witnesses described seeing the Buk missile system in transit to the rebel territories. Shortly after the missile was fired, the Buk system was reloaded onto a truck and taken back into Russia.
Witnesses near the identified launch site — on farmland near Pervomaiskyi — saw and photographed the condensation trail of the missile, the report says.
The investigators also said they could conclusively reject the possibility that another plane, instead of a surface-to-air missile, shot down the plane. Radar data from Russia and Ukraine, as well as information provided by the U.S., show no other aircraft near the flight at the time of the crash, investigators say.
Snapshot Sleuthing Confirms Russian Military Presence In Ukraine
Reports of the Russian military helping pro-Russian separatist fighters in Ukraine are common — but can be hard to confirm. Russia denies that its soldiers are fighting in Ukraine.
Ostrovsky's new documentary, Selfie Soldiers, chronicles his journey in the footsteps of Bato Dambaev, who he'd confirmed was enlisted in the Russian military. He then contacted Dambaev directly.VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky decided to retrace the steps of one soldier — as documented in the soldier's social media posts — to see where exactly the soldier had been, and if this might help confirm Russia's direct involvement in Ukraine.
The film follows up on recent work by the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., think tank that issued a report relying on open-source information to track and verify locations where photos and videos of Russian soldiers and equipment have been taken in Ukraine.
"I wanted to find any way to be able to confirm what pretty much everybody already believes, which is that the Russian government has been directly involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine," Ostrovsky tells NPR's Arun Rath.
"And it just happened to be that it was the Russian soldiers themselves who provided that proof inadvertently, by posting photographs of themselves online in Ukraine," he says. "And it couldn't have been simpler. So there it is."
Interview Highlights
On how he found Bato Dambaev
We were working together with the Atlantic Council and Elliott Higgins, who's a citizen journalist who's been geolocating — which is to say, finding the location of photographs — for a long time, until we found one who'd posted a photograph of himself in an area that looked like it was a battlefield and was different from all of the other photographs that he'd posted of himself.
So once we saw that there was a photograph there that looked a lot like it could have been taken in Ukraine, we started focusing on this soldier. ... We traced his entire journey from Siberia, 4,000 miles away, to eastern Ukraine.
On Dambaev's reaction
He denied everything. I think he'd actually been prepared, as all soldiers are, that they're supposed to take off their insignia before they go into Ukraine. They're supposed to not take cellphones with them. He'd broken that rule, so he knew that he was in trouble.
I know that he reported me having contacted him immediately after I spoke with him on the phone. And this isn't in the film, but a few hours after I put the phone down, the security services came and paid me a visit in my hotel and I was essentially hounded by them out of Russia thereafter.
On Russia denying its role in Ukraine
It's a very sensitive issue, the participation of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, because everybody from Putin on down denies that it's happening. So until Russians understand, until the Russian government admits that it's taking part in the conflict, I don't think there's going to be any kind of a resolution. And I hope that this film brings us a little bit closer, at least, to that sort of an admission that it's going on. ...
One ... way I think the Russians are trying to prevent this kind of reporting is I've been applying for journalist accreditation, which I've been able to get before, for the last year, over a year. And it was a few days after I was basically pushed out of Russia that I finally got an email saying that I would be denied journalist paperwork.
An explanation was never given to me, and I think this is an extra method that the government is using to prevent reporting on its activities on Ukraine.
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