On Thursday, a Dutch court convicted three individuals of murder for their participation in downing a Malaysia Airlines flight eight years ago, killing 298 people.
The Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down by a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/russia" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Russian</a> missile while it was in air space over a portion of eastern Ukraine controlled by separatists in 2014. The plane was operating 1,000 feet above the restricted zone, but it was still shot down.
Flight MH17 <a href="https://www.axios.com/2022/11/17/malaysian-airlines-mh17-plane-crash-dutch-court" target="_blank" rel="noopener">was</a> on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on July 17, 2014, and the majority of the passengers onboard were from the Netherlands. They included 15 crew members and 80 children.
The men convicted were Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, as well as Ukrainian separatist Leonid Kharchenko. They were not at the trial, and have not been apprehended, so it is not likely that they will have to serve out their life sentences. An additional Russian suspect who was at the trial was <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/dutch-court-sentences-3-to-life-finds-russian-missile-downed-2014-malaysia-airlines-flight-killing-298-aboard" target="_blank" rel="noopener">acquitted</a> because there wasn’t enough evidence.
The convictions place the fault on Russian President Vladimir Putin&#8217;s government, although the Kremlin has consistently said it played no role in the incident, according to the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-kuala-lumpur-malaysia-netherlands-099084a82b49b77b116878e24fc63a18" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Associated Press</a>.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, they are fully responsible, up until the Kremlin,” Peter Langstraat, an attorney for one of the families, said. “You cannot move this heavy military material without the consent of somebody high up in the military hierarchy. What does it mean? Close to or in the Kremlin.”
Although the three man were attempting to bring down a military jet, rather than a passenger plane, the judges still found that the act was intentional to shoot down a plane, according to the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63637625" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BBC</a>.
The trial went on for over two years, and Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said the proof brought by prosecutors showed that the plane was downed by a missile from pro-Russian Ukrainian soldiers in 2014.
“This is part of justice for us. It is not the whole thing yet, but it is a good start,” Seline Frederiksz-Hoogzand said, whose son Bryce and girlfriend Daisy were killed on the flight. “Even though nobody will go to prison, justice has been done.”
&#8220;Putin has never been stopped, and still has not been stopped. And he will not stop until he is stopped,&#8221; she <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63637625" target="_blank" rel="noopener">added</a>. “I hope the world wakes up now, because we knew it already eight years ago.&#8221;
Eliot Higgins founded investigative research group Bellingcat, which looked into the proof and gave their discoveries to prosecutors. Higgins thinks what happened in 2014 and this year are connected.
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&#8220;People were just turning a blind eye to it, policymakers just weren&#8217;t comfortable with calling out Russia in a way they really should have done. And they didn&#8217;t react in the way that could have prevented the invasion in 2022,&#8221; Higgins told the BBC. &#8220;I think there should have been more military support for Ukraine, there should have been more sanctions, there should have been a stronger response than we saw at the time. There could have been preventative measures that would have saved a lot of lives.&#8221;
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision was “a solid step towards justice,” but more still has to be done to hold the guilty accountable.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted, “It is an important decision in the court. &#8230; (But) it is necessary that those who ordered it also find themselves in the dock, because impunity leads to new crimes.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry, for its part, said the court was giving in to pressure from Dutch political figures, prosecutors, and the press. “There is no need to talk about objectivity and impartiality in such conditions,” it reportedly said in a statement.

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Three Convicted In Downing Of 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight

Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, Leonid Kharchenko Convicted In Downing Of 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17

Air and Space

Malaysia Flight MH17

Russia

Ukraine

World

Just days after The Atlantic published their comprehensive investigation on the whereabouts of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared into thin air in March 2014, a European joint task force revealed it has leveled charges against four men &#8212; one Ukranian and three Russians &#8212; for a second Malaysian airlines tragedy: the July 2014 explosion of MH17.
<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48691488">The BBC reports</a> that the four men, who investigators believe were in direct contact with Russian officials, are accused of transporting missiles into an area of Ukraine for the purpose of shooting down a passenger jet. The four &#8220;did not push the button themselves,&#8221; investigators say, but provided the local milita with the means used to down the Malaysian airlines flight.
The joint investigative team is Dutch and plans to prosecute the four men &#8212; Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov from Russia, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenkoin &#8212; in the Netherlands under Dutch law. The trial won&#8217;t begin until 2020, however, since Dutch authorities say they still have at least eight more persons of interest to investigate in relation to the case.
Investigators believe that Girkin, a former Russian intelligence official, was in &#8220;direct contact with the Russian Federation&#8221; and that he and his team were well aware of what they were arming local militias to do, and that they&#8217;d reported their progress to Russian officials.
Investigators did not reveal why they believe the Russian-allied Ukrainian militias targeted the Malaysian Airlines jet specifically, only that the team had &#8220;evidence showing that Russia provided the missile launcher.&#8221;
Unsurprisingly, Russia has refused to cooperate with the investigation and disputes the Dutch investigators&#8217; findings. Russian officials say they do not believe any of their anti-aircraft missiles ever crossed the Russian border into Ukraine, even though investigators believe that the missile that hit MH17 belonged to the &#8220;53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade,&#8221; based in Kursk.
MH17, the second of two Malaysian Airlines aircraft to meet a tragic end in 2014, took off from Amsterdam&#8217;s Schiphol Airport on July 17, 2014, bound for Kualu Lumpur, but suddenly went silent and then disappeared off air traffic control radar around 50 miles from the Ukraine-Russia border, according to the BBC.
&#8220;At the time, an armed conflict was raging on the ground in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces, and several government military aircraft had been downed in the previous weeks, while government air strikes were being carried out on rebel-held areas,&#8221; the BBC reports.
A year later, after conducting a thorough investigation, Dutch authorities determined that MH17 had been hit by a &#8220;Buk missile&#8221; which destroyed the plane, instantly killing the 298 people aboard.
Families of the victims, which include 80 children and 15 crewmembers, hope that they&#8217;ll get some closure from the upcoming trial, though even investigators aren&#8217;t sure how quickly justice will move, given how little Russia appears willing to cooperate.
What is clear is that the families of MH17 are now in a better position than the families of MH370, which vanished off radar in March 2014 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, China. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/">The Atlantic released an intense investigative</a> report on the doomed Boeing 777 on Monday, after reporters spent months gathering and synthesizing evidence, official reports, and interviews with those investigating the plane&#8217;s disappearance.
In that case, authorities are still stumped as to why MH370 made a sudden turn just as it was crossing into Vietnamese airspace, flew back over Malaysia, turned north over the major city of Penang, and then curved back south on a trajectory that ended somewhere over the Indian Ocean.
Investigators now believe the pilot, who could have been suffering from depression, may have deliberately flown the plane off course, killed all aboard by depressurizing the aircraft, and then manually crashed the plane into the sea, but little evidence can be corroborated and few pieces of debris from the plane have been found.

The OTHER Malaysian Airlines Flight: Three Russians And Ukranian Charged With Shooting Down MH17, Killing 298

This week Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump once again played interference for Russia, saying there is not enough evidence to implicate them in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the Democratic National Committee hacking. 
A comprehensive Dutch investigation into MH17 has confirmed what US intelligence officials have known all along: the passenger plane was struck down by Russian-made weapons. Trump has yet to respond to the new report released by Dutch investigators. In repeatedly denying Russia&#8217;s alleged involvement, Trump has rejected the conclusions of the US intelligence community, which believes &#8220;with confidence&#8221; that pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine deliberately shot down the plane. 
Giving credence to the Kremlin&#8217;s claims, the Republican presidential nominee has at times assumed the role of defense attorney for Moscow. In an interview with CNN last October, Trump flirted with the notion that Russia really wasn&#8217;t involved in the MH17 tragedy.
&#8220;It&#8217;s disgusting and disgraceful but Putin and Russia say they didn&#8217;t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it. Possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it,&#8221; Trump <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/14/politics/donald-trump-mh17-plane-russians/index.html">said</a>, adding, &#8220;They say it wasn&#8217;t them. It may have been their weapon, but they didn&#8217;t use it, they didn&#8217;t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you&#8217;ll probably never know for sure.&#8221;
Failing to acknowledge that Vladimir Putin himself doesn&#8217;t have to personally pull the trigger for the Russian government to be culpable in arming, training, and dispatching soldiers from across the border into Ukraine to occupy the Crimean peninsula, Trump echoed Kremlin talking points and fed the narrative that a local uprising led by spontaneously-armed, highly-organized Russian-speaking militias simply came to exercise territorial control over sovereign Ukrainian territory in opposition to Kiev&#8217;s pro-European sentiments.
Flight MH17 was shot down over territory occupied by Russian troops who have simply taken off their official insignia from their uniforms, or as Moscow likes to call them, &#8220;pro-Russian separatists.&#8221; The flight was shot down by a Russian-made rocket and warhead.
In his latest debate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Monday, Trump tried to refute the assertion that Russian state-sponsored actors were behind a series of high-profile cyber-attacks against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other US targets. The fact that Trump recently received an intelligence briefing by US national security officials detailing Russia&#8217;s clear involvement in the cyber-attacks only lent credence to claims that the GOP nominee&#8217;s fondness for the dictator of Russia was too close for comfort.
&#8220;Trump has praised Putin during the campaign, and at the first presidential debate, on Sept. 26, he said it wasn&#8217;t clear the Russians were behind the DNC hack,&#8221; <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/14/politics/donald-trump-mh17-plane-russians/index.html">reports</a> Time Magazine. &#8220;But the U.S. intelligence community has &#8216;high confidence&#8217; that Russian intelligence services were in fact responsible, multiple intelligence and national security officials tell TIME. Trump was informed of that assessment during a recent classified intelligence briefing, a U.S. official familiar with the matter tells TIME.&#8221;
Even after facing media scrutiny in the wake of his contentious debate, Trump refused to back down from his Russia-friendly rhetoric. Here&#8217;s what he told Time in a statement this week:
<blockquote>
I do not comment on information I receive in intelligence briefings, however, nobody knows with definitive certainty that this was in fact Russia. It may be, but it may also be China, another country or individual.
</blockquote>
Trump is right about one thing, though. He can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and he likely would not lose support among his most devout followers. But for the rest of us, Trump&#8217;s dangerous flirtations with Putin can no longer be cast aside as an amusing sideshow. In the last two weeks alone, Kremlin-backed hackers have brazenly publicized the fact they were able to infiltrate and steal data from a major US political party. Moscow isn&#8217;t trying to even keep it a secret anymore.

Trump Defends His Bestest Friend Vladimir Putin AGAIN on MH17, Hacking

Donald Trump

Vladimir Putin

Donald Trump has stepped in it again.
CNN <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/14/politics/donald-trump-mh17-plane-russians/">reports</a>, &#8220;Donald Trump doesn&#8217;t believe there is enough evidence to blame pro-Russian separatists for last year&#8217;s downing of a commercial airliner over Ukraine &#8212; despite the fact that the U.S. intelligence community believes &#8216;with confidence&#8217; that pro-Russian separatists shot it down&#8230;
&#8220;It&#8217;s disgusting and disgraceful but Putin and Russia say they didn&#8217;t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it. Possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it,&#8221; <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/14/politics/donald-trump-mh17-plane-russians/">touted</a> Trump, adding, &#8220;They say it wasn&#8217;t them. It may have been their weapon, but they didn&#8217;t use it, they didn&#8217;t fire it, they even said the other side fired it to blame them. I mean to be honest with you, you&#8217;ll probably never know for sure.&#8221;
Both U.S. intelligence services and Dutch investigators have <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/14/politics/donald-trump-mh17-plane-russians/">determined</a>, unequivocally, that Malaysia Flight MH17, a civilian carrier, was shot down by a Russian missile. And yet Trump insists on playing the fool. It&#8217;s a role he has come to know well. Trump&#8217;s cacophony comes just days after his fall down the rabbit&#8217;s hole of 9/11 conspiracy theories, insisting that he would have effectively prevented attacks against the World Trade Center, if he were president.
<blockquote>
&#8220;It&#8217;s disgusting and disgraceful but Putin and Russia say they didn&#8217;t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it.&#8221;
Donald Trump
</blockquote>
In an <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/18/trump-suggests-might-have-prevented-11-attacks-extending-feud-with-bush/">interview</a> on Fox News Sunday, Trump &#8220;implied his stance on immigration could have kept out the terrorists who slipped into the United States and trained in the country to hijack the four commercial airliners&#8221; and kill American civilians on September 11, 2001. &#8220;I am extremely, extremely tough on illegal immigration. I believe that if I were running things&#8230;I doubt that those people would have been in the country,&#8221; <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/18/trump-suggests-might-have-prevented-11-attacks-extending-feud-with-bush/">squawked</a> Trump in his trademark hyperbole. Thankfully, Gov. Jeb Bush crawled out of his cowardly cave and actually defended his brother for nearly the first time since his shaky campaign began:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
How pathetic for <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">@realdonaldtrump</a> to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked &amp; my brother kept us safe.
&#8212; Jeb Bush (@JebBush) <a href="https://twitter.com/JebBush/status/655098096649707520">October 16, 2015</a></blockquote>
Lending his voice to the chorus of historical revisionism, Republican presidential front-runner Dr. Ben Carson <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/carson-declaring-energy-independence-turned-bin-laden-weeks/story?id=34556891">shared</a> the opportunity to attack President Bush&#8217;s legacy, sharing similar sentiments as Trump:
<blockquote>
GOP presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson [remained] steadfast in his assertion that if the United States had declared its intention to achieve <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/energy/energy-policy.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">energy independence</a> after the September 11th terror attacks, moderate Arab governments would have turned over <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/iraq/osama-bin-laden.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Osama bin Laden</a> within two weeks.
&#8220;I think they would have been extremely concerned about what the ramifications of that would have been,&#8221; Carson said on ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week.&#8221; &#8220;And I believe they would have been considerably more cooperative.&#8221;
</blockquote>
Max Boot, military historian and foreign-policy analyst who has been called one of the &#8220;world&#8217;s leading authorities on armed conflict,&#8221; excoriated both candidates, laying bare the cartoonish fallacies in their statements. First Boot <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/trump-and-carson-get-911-wrong/">underscored</a> the utter absurdity of Trump&#8217;s comments: &#8220;Donald Trump has been on an all-out offensive to do something that even few Democrats have dared to do &#8212; i.e., to blame George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks. Is he next going to blame Franklin Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor? <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2015/10/18/trump-triples-down-on-george-w-bushs-responsibility-for-911/">Trump&#8217;s reasoning</a>, if that&#8217;s the word for it, is as specious as possible.&#8221; But Trump&#8217;s weakest argument concerns his pet hobbyhorse &#8212; illegal immigrants. Boot continued:
<blockquote>
&#8220;We had very weak immigration laws,&#8221; Trump said, adding that perhaps if Bush had had a Trump-style immigration policy, replete with &#8220;the strong laws that I&#8217;m wanting, these terrorists wouldn&#8217;t have been in the country.&#8221; Trump undoubtedly does not realize this (there is so much he does not know), but the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers were in this country legally on valid visas. They were not immigrants, legal or otherwise.
</blockquote>
Boot then <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/campaigns-elections/trump-and-carson-get-911-wrong/">deconstructed</a> Carson&#8217;s &#8220;novel&#8221; theory, exposing its logical pitfalls:
<blockquote>
It&#8217;s hard to know how to disentangle a theory so loopy. In the first place, the Saudis did not have Bin Laden to hand over to us or anyone else in 2001; Bin Laden was then living in Afghanistan under Taliban protection. By that point, the Saudis had no love lost for him because he had declared a jihad against the Saudi royal family. The Saudis had stripped him of his citizenship and frozen his bank accounts. By what mechanism were they supposed to turn him over to the U.S.? And why, if the U.S. were not reliant on energy imports, would that make the Saudis more anxious to help us? Wouldn&#8217;t they be more eager to help us if we were a bigger customer of their leading export &#8212; i.e. if we were less energy independent?
</blockquote>
As the GOP primary election heats up, we&#8217;re bound to see a lot more of Trump&#8217;s ill-considered bloviation.

Trump Says Russians Didn’t Shoot Down MH17. Um, Wut?

George W. Bush

Jeb Bush

On Tuesday, Dutch investigators released a long-awaited <a href="http://cdn.onderzoeksraad.nl/documents/report-mh17-crash-en.pdf">report</a> on Malaysia Flight MH17, the passenger airline shot down on July 17, 2014 over Ukrainian airspace. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) spent months analyzing debris and wreckage strewn all over eastern Ukraine, territory held by pro-Russian rebels. The safety board ultimately concluded that the civilian flight was shot down by a Russian-made Buk missile.
&#8220;Flight MH17 crashed as a result of the detonation of a warhead outside the airplane,&#8221; <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/inquiry-finds-mh17-plane-shot-down-buk-missile-073808003.html">explained</a> DSB Chairman Tjibbe Joustra, &#8220;This warhead fits the kind of missile that is installed in the BUK surface-to-air missile system.&#8221; There were 298 people on board flight MH17. All the passengers died, including 88 children. The circumstantial (and palpably physical evidence) is indisputable. The Russians are responsible for the downing of MH17. The Kremlin either ordered the strike directly or condoned the assault launched by occupying pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, armed and equipped by the Russian military.
And yet, the DSB was cautious about directly invoking the Russians. Understandably, the DSB does not have the geopolitical leverage or gravitas to hold the Russians culpable. Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs would read explicit language of Russian aggression as a provocation, perhaps even worse. As a result, the DSB treaded softly. &#8220;Even though the Dutch-led inquiry did not say who pulled the trigger, Russian officials were already disputing the findings set to further degrade strained ties between Moscow and the West,&#8221; <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/inquiry-finds-mh17-plane-shot-down-buk-missile-073808003.html">reported</a> Agence France-Presse (AFP).
<blockquote>
&#8220;My heart goes out to the victims of MH17. Too much energy spent trying to cast blame.&#8221;
U.S. Embassy in Russia Spokesman Will Stevens
</blockquote>
The United States is the only entity strong enough to challenge Putin. Unfortunately. President Obama&#8217;s policy of &#8220;strategic patience,&#8221; does not allow room for holding post-Soviet criminal enterprises responsible, even if it means letting Putin get away with the murder of nearly 300 innocents, including Americans. The president scapegoats &#8220;colonialism&#8221; for the shifting tectonic plates of power politics.
In a now-deleted tweet, an Obama official dismissed the report as irrelevant. According to The Free Beacon, &#8220;A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Russia said on Tuesday that &#8216;too much energy&#8217; has been spent trying to discover who is responsible for the terrorist attack on a Malaysian airlines flight last year that killed nearly 300 people.&#8221; Cowards litter the lawns of the White House. In an insult to the victims and their families, embassy spokesman Will Stevens <a href="http://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-embassy-spokesman-too-much-energy-spent-trying-to-cast-blame-for-mh17-attack/">screeched</a>:
<blockquote>
My heart goes out to the victims of MH17. Too much energy spent trying to cast blame.
</blockquote>
When 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney cited Russia as one of the biggest threats facing U.S. interests, President Obama scoffed at the idea, mocking the GOP contender for living in the past and digging up the Cold-War.
Romney was correct. In fact, he perfectly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/03/20/was-romney-right-a-look-back-at-his-campaign-predictions/">predicted</a> the course of foreign policy developments during Obama&#8217;s second-term. Instead of heeding the call of prudence, Obama did what he does best: making straw-man arguments and dismissing geopolitical realities in favor of ideological rigidity. Like a school-yard bully unable to engage in reasoned debate, Obama impulsively taunted Romney, <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/03/03/why_obama_got_russia_wrong_and_romney_got_it_right.html">saying</a>:
<blockquote>
Governor Romney, I&#8217;m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what&#8217;s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they&#8217;re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War&#8217;s been over for 20 years. But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s&#8230;
</blockquote>
Cool and measured, Romney&#8217;s prescient <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/03/03/why_obama_got_russia_wrong_and_romney_got_it_right.html">response</a> now haunts the Obama administration, underlining the dramatic failure of foreign policy:
<blockquote>
Russia I indicated is a geopolitical foe&#8230; and I said in the same &#8212; in the same paragraph I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face. Russia does continue to battle us in the U.N. time and time again. I have clear eyes on this. I&#8217;m not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. Putin. And I&#8217;m certainly not going to say to him, I&#8217;ll give you more flexibility after the election. After the election, he&#8217;ll get more backbone. 
</blockquote>
Obama&#8217;s hallmark arrogance was on full-display that evening. Rather than focusing on geopolitical contingencies and foreign policy decisions, the president and his cohort of single-minded social issue peddlers ran with Romney&#8217;s &#8220;binders full of women&#8221; comment. Historians will look back at that moment and cringe at just how much this president harnessed red-herrings, witticisms, and snide remarks to avoid strategic deliberation.

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Malaysia Flight MH17

Three Convicted In Downing Of 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight

The OTHER Malaysian Airlines Flight: Three Russians And Ukranian Charged With Shooting Down MH17, Killing 298

Trump Defends His Bestest Friend Vladimir Putin AGAIN on MH17, Hacking

Trump Says Russians Didn’t Shoot Down MH17. Um, Wut?

Russia Shot Down a Civilian Airliner; You Won’t Believe The US’s Response