Quote Originally Posted by Ronin13 View Post
So SRG's emotion-filled rants aside (no offense), the general consensus is that Russia (or agents from) downed the aircraft in order to place blame on Ukraine? Or was this a really horrible case of mistaken identity and someone (RUS or UKR) shot it down thinking it was an opposing aircraft? Either way, my question still remains: WTF is Malaysian Airlines doing flying over an active combat zone? The only non-military flights that ever flew over where I was in Afghanistan were flights going into and out of either Kabul or BAF.
Not quite. I think overeager separatists downed it thinking they were going after Ukrainian Army reinforcements. Not sure if they were using Russian-provided equipment or equipment stolen from the Ukrainian Army (using Russian-provided equipment in their raids). One of the problems with proxy-wars is that there is often minimal quality control (or any kind of control) over the proxies.

If you look at the flight path, it was a normal route to Kuala Lumpur, deviations would have incurred significant fuel costs and they had no reason to think anyone would target a well-established commercial route. I saw a report they were advised the Ukrainian separatists had SAMs but didn't know the SAMs would have the range to hit commercial aircraft at over 30,000 ft. I don't know how much credence to give to it as I heard it just in passing.