Russia has a history of downing passenger planes — and covering it up (original) (raw)

A decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, went down over a portion of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed forces, killing 298 passengers and crew. The Kremlin denied responsibility and spun out various conspiracy theories, blaming the crash on either a Ukrainian fighter jet or some kind of elaborate CIA plot. (A Russian website even bizarrely claimed that the passengers were already dead when the plane took off.) Eventually a Dutch-led investigation proved that the airplane had been brought down by a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile system fired from the Russian-controlled region of Ukraine.