On the menu today: A new Netflix documentary about the mysteriously disappearing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 explores some outlandish conspiracy theories, including that the Russian government or U.S. government secretly brought down the plane and covered up the whole diabolical plot. It’s a little odd to spend time exploring the notion that Russia would secretly destroy a Malaysian Airlines passenger airliner, when a few months later, Russian-controlled forces openly shot down another Malaysian Airlines passenger airliner. That abominable crime demonstrated Vladimir Putin’s recklessness and the Obama administration’s fecklessness, and previewed the Russian aggression we now see in the invasion of Ukraine.
The Malaysian Airlines Mystery
Netflix recently unveiled a new documentary limited series, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared, about the Malaysian Airlines airliner flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that shut off its transponder and just disappeared on March 8, 2014. This turned into one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the aviation world, and the disappearance was baffling enough to spur CNN anchor Don Lemon to ask, on air, whether a “black hole” really was such a preposterous theory. The unflappable guest answered, “Well, a small black hole would suck in our entire universe, so we know it’s not that.”
Way back in 2015, CNN and other news organizations reported that a preliminary assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies “suggested it was likely someone in the cockpit deliberately caused the aircraft’s movements to go off course before the Malaysian airliner disappeared.” A 2018 report by the Australian edition of 60 Minutes assembled a team of analysts who noted that the airliner had deviated from its course to fly over Penang, Malaysia, the childhood hometown of Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah. The team theorized that all but one of the 239 people on the plane had probably been unconscious — incapacitated by the sudden depressurization of the Boeing 777 — and that Shah, despondent over his failing marriage, was committing mass murder-suicide in the most horrific way. Other investigators vehemently disputed that explanation, and some reviewers of the current documentary series contend that it is “stunningly irresponsible” in the way it reenacts some of the theories.
The series does explore two theories that seem way too far-fetched to believe. The first is that Russian operatives hijacked the plane and crashed it in the desert of central Kazakhstan to distract the world from the occupation of Crimea. The second is that the U.S. military shot down the plane to prevent a shipment of electronics from reaching China.
It would be nice if the renewed attention on Flight 370 brought more public attention to the fate of another Malaysian Airlines plane that didn’t arrive at its destination. Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, by Russian separatist forces.
If you looked hard enough, that other Malaysian plane was back in the news last month, as “a team of international investigators said Wednesday they have ‘concrete information’ that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely approved the transfer of the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, killing all 298 people on board.” The missile was fired by a Buk Telar system operated by a militia of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” a so-called Russian Republic in eastern Ukraine that was fighting with forces of the legitimate Ukrainian government.
The team, made up of investigators from the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium, and Ukraine, announced that they had found “strong indications that a decision on providing the Buk Telar — or in any event a heavier air defense system with a higher range — to the DPR was taken at presidential level.”
That said, Vladimir Putin is not heading to The Hague anytime soon, at least not for the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. The investigators wrote:
Though the investigation produced strong indications, the high bar of complete and conclusive evidence is not reached. Furthermore, whether [Putin] is entitled to claim combatant immunity, the president of the Russian Federation, as head of state, is in any event immune under international law from prosecution. Under Dutch law , a head of state cannot be prosecuted for any offence whatsoever, even a war crime. . . . Immunity applies for as long as Putin remains head of state.
Does it make sense to have heads of state immune from prosecution for war crimes while they’re in power? The world has enough megalomaniacal dictators with dreams of territorial domination. Do we really need to give them the get-out-of-jail-free card from Monopoly, too?
Whether or not Putin met the legal threshold for liability, he surpassed the moral threshold for liability long ago.
More than a few aviation experts will contend that a Boeing 777 cannot easily be mistaken for a military aircraft, and air-traffic and radar records indicate that no Ukrainian aircraft was within 30 miles of the Malaysian Airlines plane — meaning either the separatists knew it was a civilian jetliner and fired anyway, or the Russian military handed off anti-aircraft weapons to militants so utterly incompetent that they couldn’t distinguish between military and civilian aircraft. In any other context, we would consider that state-sponsored terrorism.
Back in 2020, Dutch prosecutors brought charges against four commanders of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Two years later — eight years after the plane was shot down — the Hague District Court found three of the four defendants — Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, and Leonid Kharchenko — guilty of causing Flight MH17 to crash, resulting in the deaths of all 298 occupants, and of the murder of those occupants. The court sentenced those three defendants to life imprisonment. The fourth defendant, Oleg Pulatov, was acquitted. Note that the four men were tried in absentia and aren’t in European custody.
The verdict is a very small serving of long-delayed justice for the victims and their families. One American, Quinn Lucas Schansman, age 18, was killed on that flight, but the fate of MH17 never seemed like a high priority for the Obama administration. When Obama spoke about it, the late Charles Krauthammer slammed the president for the “unbelievable, passive nature” of his speech, contending that he sounded “practically half asleep.”
CNN’s chief national-security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, wrote a book in 2019, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China’s Secret Operations to Defeat America, that offered a scathing assessment of the Obama administration’s response to the crisis. Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2013 to 2016, described to Sciutto an excruciatingly slow-footed response:
The day after the MH17 crash, Pyatt recalls a contentious videoconference with Obama administration officials in Washington.
“That was one of the darkest days of my time in Ukraine,” said Ambassador Pyatt. “I remember one of my Washington colleagues saying something along the lines of, ‘we have to be very careful not to jump to conclusions.’
That answer was too much for Ambassador Pyatt to take.
“It was one of my more unguarded moments because I remember saying very clearly, ‘you say we don’t know what happened, but we do know. We do know that Russia is responsible, that there were no Ukrainian missiles of this class in the region, and one way or another, the Kremlin is responsible for the deaths of three hundred people.’”
Shortly after the separatists shot down the plane, Matthew Continetti presciently wrote, “The attack is revolting, the loss of life infuriating, but the downing of Flight MH17 is not the first unanticipated outcome of the war Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine. Nor will it be the last.”
After The Hague verdicts, the Wall Street Journal editorial board concluded that “the free world’s great mistake regarding Russia was doing nothing despite the many signs of Mr. Putin’s marauding ambitions. Ukraine and the world are now paying the price for sleeping amid the gathering storm.”
ADDENDUM: You should always read Michael Brendan Dougherty, but there’s a short segment in today’s essay about Florida governor Ron DeSantis that is particularly thought-provoking:
[For some Republicans] the theory is that the GOP primary electorate is entirely committed to Trumpism as a kind of troll of the existing political class. They are voting for the entertainment of it all — largely indifferent to policy or governance. This is the idea of Trump as post-scarcity political figure. Americans are so accustomed to things working out in the end that they vote for a breaker of norms just for the kick it provides. [Emphasis added.]
The irony is that Americans could feel “so accustomed to things working out in the end” after 9/11, the Iraq War, the Great Recession, the Covid-19 pandemic, and any other calamities of the past two decades or so that you think fits alongside them.
Things don’t always work out in the end, which is why government requires competent leadership. Government is not here to entertain you, and I suspect there’s an inverse relationship between good, competent, even boring government that generates good results and a government full of officials who are entertaining.