Official Dutch Safety Board video based on analysis of damage shows missile came from the opposite direction compared to claim
Vladimir Putin is a dictator and not to be trusted – but are western governments and organisations any more honest?
A video shown by Al Jazeera today claims to show ‘undeniable proof’ that a Malaysian Airlines flight shot down over Ukraine in 2014 was hit by a missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-aligned forces using an anti-aircraft missile supplied by Russia.
The programme claims to show ‘absolute proof’ that the missile was fired from Russian-controlled territory, based on analysis of the wreckage by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB), because the aircraft was struck on the left-hand side and Ukrainian forces were to the right. However, it then goes on to say that the analysis was so detailed that the DSB was able to reconstruct the missile strike and shows footage of the DSB’s official reconstruction – which clearly shows the missile approaching from the aircraft’s front right, passing the nose before detonating on the other side:
A missile strike from any direction could, of course, have been fired by either a Russian or Ukrainian aircraft, although the Russian-speaking dissidents were not known to have fighter aircraft, but this possibility is also dismissed as disproven by the side of the Malaysian plane that was struck.
The Al Jazeera programme also draws heavily on analysis by Bellingcat, which it describes as ‘an Amsterdam-based research group’. However, Bellingcat is funded by a ‘CIA-adjacent’ organisation and by the EU and has long been accused of alignment with US government policy:
This funding was not mentioned by Al Jazeera.
Last year, Bellingcat justified a Ukrainian bomb attack on a cafe in St Petersburg, Russia, on the grounds the cafe was a ‘legitimate target’ because the Russian philosopher the Ukrainians wanted to kill was a ‘propagandist’:
A Freedom of Information response also raised questions about Bellingcat’s potential direct involvement with security services. Noting the attempts of Bellingcat’s founder to force the removal of its article about the FOI response, a Grayzone editor’s note at the start of the article states:
On December 22, The Grayzone received an email from Bellingcat founder and editor-in-chief Eliot Higgins threatening legal action if this story was not removed from the internet. Attempts to respond to Higgins produced an out of office automated reply, noting he was now on vacation until January 8. Higgins’ intervention was spurred due to certain passages of this article stating categorically that an email released under FOI laws offers proof of direct collusion between Bellingcat and Western intelligence agencies. This article has now been subject to minor revisions as a result. Had Bellingcat responded to The Grayzone’s request for comment prior to publication on the FOI document apparently demonstrating evidence of coordination with Western intelligence, we would have incorporated their perspective and reply. But they refused.
Further, Higgins did not challenge The Grayzone’s reporting on Bellingcat’s likely involvement in a botched Ukrainian intelligence operation which resulted in the killing of Kiev’s forces in significant numbers. Nor did he counter our conclusion that a 2020 Bellingcat hatchet job on independent researchers appears to have been a product of a Western intelligence information operation.
The Al Jazeera programme appears to contradict itself and omits important information. None of this proves Russia did not fire the missile – and a Dutch court found Russian personnel guilty in absentia of shooting down the aircraft. However, it serves as a reminder that ‘mainstream’ media claims about international, or indeed any, incidents should be carefully scrutinised before taking them at face value – even in the case of Al Jazeera, which provides among the best coverage of the Gaza genocide but takes a more western-aligned approach to events in some other areas.
The UK media do not, of course, even balance themselves by proper coverage of Israel’s mass murder of civilians in Gaza – and has been shown to have whitewashed the ethnic cleansing Ukraine was attempting in Russian-speaking areas in 2014, at the time of the downing of the aircraft. Western governments, similarly, have misled over Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and have provided political cover for its war crimes.
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