Malaysian Airlines just can't catch a break. Just four months after flight 370 disappeared somewhere over the Indian Ocean, Thursday brings news that Malaysian Airlines flight 17, traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, lost contact with ground control around the Ukrainian-Russian border. Initial reports say "50 km away from entering Russian airspace, the plane began descending, then it was observed burning on the ground on Ukrainian territory." The plane, a Boeing 777, is said to have been carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members.
Over the last couple of months, pro-Russian separatists have been downing Ukrainian military planes with increasing regularity—and mounting casualties on the Ukrainian side. Just earlier Thursday, separatists had shot down another one. All of that seemed to undermine the narrative, propagated by the Kremlin, that the separatists were just a ragtag people's militia who didn't stand a chance against a proper, organized military. The constant downing of Ukrainian jets showed that these men were equipped with some pretty serious stuff: You can't really shoot down a jet with a Kalashnikov.
And, in fact, Russian a state media report from late June indicates the rebels got a hold of a Buk missile system, a Russian/Soviet surface-to-air missile system. Rebels are now denying that they shot down the plane, but there are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MH17 fell. "Don't fly in our skies," he reportedly wrote. If that's true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118742/ukraine-russian-rebels-malaysian-airlines-plane
