Max Fisher examines a big piece of evidence:
It looked like the smoking gun: exactly 35 minutes after Malaysia Airlines flight 17 went down over eastern Ukraine, a social media account belonging to the eastern Ukrainian rebel commander Igor Strelkov posted a message bragging of having “brought down” an aircraft.
But there this isn’t as clear-cut as it first seemed:
(1) Strelkov’s post, on the Russian social networking site VK, was quickly deleted. A later post appeared to blame Ukrainian government forces for shooting down the plane.
(2) The VK account may not actually be run by Strelkov at all. BuzzFeed’s Max Seddon spoke to eastern Ukrainian rebels who said the page “is a fake made by fans.” If that’s the case, it may be that Strelkov fanboys saw the plane go down, surmised (perhaps wrongly) that rebels had shot them down, and bragged about it on the VK page. It is also possible, to be fair, that the rebels were lying to Seddon about the VK page.
(3) Strelkov’s post appeared to claim credit for shooting down not a civilian airliner but an Antonov AN-26, a two-prop transport plane that is often used by militaries in eastern Europe. The AN-26 is 78 feet long; MH17 was a Boeing 777, which is 242 feet long. It’s possible that rebels mistook the large Boeing 777 for a much smaller AN-26, especially from thousands of feet away. But this casts a bit further doubt on the idea that people fired on the airplane and then posted on VK about it; if someone fired on the plane they likely would have noticed it was a large jet and not a small-ish prop plane.
Ukraine is blaming Russia:
Breaking: #Ukraine govt says has recordings of calls b/t “terrorists” & Russian intel discussing “shoot-down” of Malaysian jet
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) July 17, 2014
The Dish 