A Malaysia Airlines’ Boeing-777 with over 290 people on board has crashed in Ukraine, close to the border with Russia. Both Kiev and the opposition deny involvement in the incident.
Reports in the Western media hurried to blame the self-defense forces of the People’s Republic of Donetsk for bringing the plane down.
The claims were denied by the representatives of the Donetsk People’s Republic, saying that it’s the Ukrainian military, which destroyed the aircraft.
“We simply don’t have such air defense systems. Our man-portable air defense systems have a firing range 3,000 – 4,000 meters. The Boeing was flying at a much higher altitude,” Sergey Kavtaradze, special representative for the prime minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, explained.
Kavtaradze also expressed condolences to the relatives of all of those who lost their lives in the tragedy.
IHS Jane’s Defense analyst, Nick de Larrinaga, also shared the belief that the self-defense forces lack the capability to bring the Malaysian plane down.
“At normal cruising altitude a civilian passenger aircraft would be out of the range of the sort of manned portable air (defense) systems that we have seen proliferate in rebel hands in east Ukraine,” he said in a statement.
But the aircraft would be within range of Buk or other medium-range surface-to-air missile systems, he stressed.
“Both Russia and Ukraine have such SAM systems in their inventories,” the expert added.
It seems unlikely that the self-defense forces could’ve used Buk surface-to-air missile systems to down the Malaysian plane, retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan, the director of the Defense and Intelligence Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said.
“It takes a lot of training and a lot of coordination to fire one of these and hit something,” he told CNN. “This is not the kind of weapon a couple of guys are going to pull out of a garage and fire.”
According to Ryan, if the plane was really taken down then it was done by a professional military force.