Matthew Fisher: Putin cranks up propaganda over crash.
When a bear is cornered, it becomes angrier and more unpredictable.
That is where Vladimir Putin’s Russia has found itself since a Malaysian airliner was shot down over the Ukrainian-Russian border on Thursday. The president’s dream of making Russia a respected global player has run into trouble again. On the defensive on all fronts, Putin is cranking up, rather than toning down his impressive propaganda apparatus.
As evidence of Moscow’s complicity in the shooting down of the civilian jet piles up, it has become obvious that instead of using this horrific tragedy — which resulted in the murder of 298 people on board — as a way to find a solution to the Russian-inspired conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin intends to continue brazenly asserting that it bears no responsibility whatsoever for how a passenger jet and human remains ended up strewn across wheat and sunflower fields in eastern Ukraine.
The difference this time — unlike when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea in March or during the four months that it has fomented political instability in eastern Ukraine — is that almost nobody outside of Russia believes anything that Moscow has to say any longer.
Peace in Europe is clearly in more danger than ever from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea if an emboldened Russia believes such be haviour will continue to be free of consequences. Still, it remains an open question whether Europe, with its long history of appeasement and looking the other way, will finally join North America in taking harsh steps to freeze the Russian economy and conclude an emergency trans-Atlantic energy pact to control the fallout if Russia responds to punitive sanctions by cutting off energy supplies to the West.
At least for public consumption, Russia has a starkly different interpretation of what happened last week in the skies over the Ukrainian-Russian border. Setting aside some of the wildest claims by Moscow’s yellow tabloids about how those killed in the crash were already dead before the missile struck, a good starting point is the sharp disappointment that observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have repeatedly expressed over the lack of access they have been allowed to the crash site, which is in rebelheld territory.
Russian state media have made no mention of any such difficulties, or the way masked men with assault weapons were overseeing the bodies being “piled in a heap” in refrigerated railway cars, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Rather, as RIA Novosti reported on Sunday, “by taking its time” it was Kyiv that had caused the delays in reaching and collecting the bodies of the crash victims.
Another report by Novosti claimed this weekend that the OSCE had found no problem with how the bodies were being handled. In fact, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who lost more than 150 compatriots in the crash, has expressed his outrage to Putin over Russia’s handling of this issue.
As for who was responsible for the missile launch, Itar-Tass said Sunday that a reputable Russian expert had told the state-run news agency that a tape posted by Ukrainian security services on the Internet only hours after Thursday’s incident, in which Russian-backed separatists spoke of shooting down an airliner, was “a fake” that had been patched together from three different recordings.
Russia Today highlighted the Russian defence ministry’s declaration Sunday that the “Ukrainian military has several batteries of Buk surface-to-air missile systems, with at least 27 launchers capable of bringing down high-flying jets in the Donetsk region.” The Ukrainians had such a missile system in operation in the region on the day of the crash and that it was this system “which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.”
A senior Russian official was quoted by the state-run international news broadcaster as stating that neither the Buk missile defence system, nor any other military equipment, has crossed the Russian border into Ukraine. Such border crossings “can’t be performed in secrecy,” the defence ministry official said.
Perversely, the last statement is true. It it no secret that for months Russia has been arming the rebels. NATO, the U.S. as well as Ukrainians living in the region, have repeatedly complained of incidents in which Russian military equipment and weaponry including missile launchers have crossed the border in easy to spot columns of 100 vehicles or more.
In spite of such longstanding charges, RIA Novosti said Sunday that it was the Ukrainian government, rather than the rebels or the Russian government, which must urgently provide investigators with details about its use of surface-to air missiles and air-to-air missiles to “help determine which missile systems were used” against the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777.
The Russian media had previously referred to the war zone as “New Russia” or as the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” Distancing itself from those appellations since Thursday, it now calls the region eastern Ukraine.
Drawing a parallel with how the Bush administration had misled the world about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin claimed Saturday that the White House had established who was “guilty” even before the investigation of the aircraft’s downing.
But the main thrust of Moscow’s relentless Sovietstyle agitprop campaign remains the same as Putin outlined on Thursday and repeated again on Friday. That is, as a senior academic at the Moscow-based CIS Research Institute told RIA Novosti, “responsibility for the tragedy — whatever the results that the investigation may produce — is borne by Kyiv because it’s the Ukrainian authorities who are to be blamed for letting the jet into that area.”
As for co-operation from the Kremlin and its proxies in the Ukrainian border areas with Russia, the International Civil Aviation Organization which has been asked by Ukraine to secure and investigate the crash site, told Reuters Sunday that it was still unable to begin its inquiries because it had not received a guarantee of safe passage for its team.
With Putin on the defensive, it is untenable that four days after the crash in an area controlled by Moscow’s proxies, not one independent forensic aviation expert has yet been able to begin investigating what happened.