The Dutch-led Joint Investigative Team on Sept. 28 officially established something many have suspected from the beginning – that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down by a Buk missile that came from Russia.
We praise the investigators’ meticulous work in finding out the truth about the crash that killed 298 people on July 17, 2014, but we condemn their lack of courage for not directly naming the true culprit in this crime – the Kremlin.
“We’re not making any statement about the involvement of the Russian Federation as a country or of people from the Russian Federation,” Dutch investigator Fred Westerbeke said.
He said the investigators did not know whether the operators of the Buk transported it independently or on someone’s orders.
Presuming that someone could transport a Buk missile launcher from Russia to Ukraine without the Kremlin’s knowledge is at the same level of absurdity as claiming that the Earth is flat.
According to British open-source intelligence outfit Bellingcat, the Buk originated from Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade. And to our knowledge, there are no privately run air defense brigades operating in Russia.
The Dutch authorities have avoided antagonizing Russia at every turn. Last year they released the results of a first probe into the cause of the crash, and carefully avoided any references to Russia and even Kremlin-backed separatists.
Russia has taken advantage of that reticence. Kremlin propaganda has turned the investigators’ refusal to discuss who was responsible for the tragedy into the lie that Dutch investigators have found no links between Russia and the MH17 crash.
The Dutch authorities’ behavior resembles that of the Norwegian prime minister in Occupied, a television series. By making concessions to Russia in the name of “peace,” he triggers a Kremlin takeover of his country.
Similarly, all Western governments, not just the Dutch, have emboldened Russia by failing to properly respond to its aggression against Ukraine and other countries.
That just gives the Kremlin a green light to ratchet up its lawlessness.
After sowing death in Georgia and Ukraine, Russian forces are targeting hospitals and humanitarian convoys in Syria, killing thousands of civilians.
The West has failed to learn from history – the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, for example, led to millions of deaths.
And now that Russian despot Vladimir Putin has entrenched his dictatorship by holding heavily-rigged elections to the Duma, Russia’s rubber-stamp legislature, there is effectively no domestic opposition to his rule.
With no one to contain him at home, the West must treat him as the war criminal that he is.
As Russian dissident and former chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov has said: “Dictators don’t ask ‘Why?’ – they ask ‘Why not?’”
The West is going to have to answer that second question for Putin loudly and clearly, otherwise the outrages will only get worse.
