#Flight MH17

[tomorrowusa]

If you shoot down a packed Malaysian airliner over Ukraine, you get praised. If you insult Putin, you're sent to prison. That's life in a hegemonic dictatorship which is Russia these days.

The last time I saw Igor Girkin was five years ago in the stairwell of a Moscow news agency. "Would you consider giving me an interview?" I asked. "No," he replied sharply and scurried away. I saw him again today. No stairwell. This time, Girkin was in a caged dock surrounded by police in the Moscow City Court. Along with other media we were allowed in to film him for just one minute before the end of his trial. A police dog kept barking. Girkin found that amusing. The verdict less so. Minutes later he was found guilty on extremism charges and sentenced to four years in a penal colony. This wasn't his first conviction. In The Hague in 2022, in absentia, Girkin was found guilty of the murder of 298 people: the passengers and crew of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. The Boeing jet had been shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014 by Russian-controlled forces in the early stages of Russia's war there. Girkin was one of three men sentenced to life imprisonment. A judgement he ignored. [ ... ] Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, ultranationalist Girkin became a prominent pro-war blogger. He became increasingly critical of the way the Russian authorities were waging the war: not hard enough, in his view. He founded a hard line nationalist movement called The Club of Angry Patriots. His problems began when he started to take that anger out on President Vladimir Putin. Public criticisms of the Russian president turned to insults. In a post last year, Girkin described Putin as "a non-entity" and "a cowardly waste of space". A few days later he was arrested. Now he's been tried and convicted.

Four years is a rather light sentence for dissent in Putin's Russia. Journalists Vladimir Kara-Murza was recently sentenced to 25 years and Ruslan Ushakov is serving 8 years – just to name two.

[dailyworldecho]

[tilos-tagebuch]

🇺🇦 Ukrainian Agony – Der verschwiegene Krieg

Westliche Medienkonsumenten bekommen ein Bild gezeichnet, was im Osten der Ukraine passiert sein soll. Doch stimmt dieses Bild? Mark Bartalmai wollte es für sich wissen und reiste mit seiner Kamera direkt an die Kriegsfront.

[kazifatagar]

Long-awaited Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Verdict To Be Out Soon

Long-awaited Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Verdict To Be Out Soon

As tensions rise over Russia’s invasion eight years later, a Dutch court will announce its decision on Thursday, November 17, in the case of four men accused of shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014. The suspects, Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, Oleg Pulatov, and Leonid Kharchenko, who are all Russians, will not be present in court because they have declined to…

[isaacsapphire]

Maybe the edgy aesthetic blogs rebloging this are not aware of what happened to flight MH17, but the original poster made a very political decision to describe this corpse as a “plane crash victim” rather than a civilian casualty of an intentional attack on an international civilian flight neither originating from nor bound for either of the belligerents by Russian soldiers and Russian-backed separatists in the opening phase of the conflict that has so far escalated into the full scale Russian Invasion of Ukraine starting in 2022.

Chaos and Serenity (MH17 Plane Crash Victim)

[anarchosgaming]

Malayia Airlines 'Heliconia' - 9M-MRD

[selvarajasomiahposts]

Flight MH17: When two elephants fight the grass gets trampled

The tragic and outrageous shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 on its journey from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur over Ukrainian airspace on Thursday is a direct consequence of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Even while offering solace to the family of the dead, the international community needs to fix the responsibility for the firing of the missile that brought down MH17 that was flying at…

[thejewishlink]

MH17 Verdicts: 2 Russians, 1 Ukrainian Convicted of Shooting Down Commercial Airliner

MH17 Verdicts: 2 Russians, 1 Ukrainian Convicted of Shooting Down Commercial Airliner

A Dutch court on Thursday convicted two Russians and a pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist in absentia of the murders of 298 people who died in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and sentenced them to life imprisonment. One Russian was acquitted because of a lack of evidence. Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said that evidence presented by prosecutors at a trial that…

[gobcorend]

"(...) it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it."

--- Norman G. Finkelstein in the book 'Knowing Too Much'

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

25th July 2014:

Third arrival of MH17 victims. For the third consecutive day, military transport planes from Kharkiv landed at Eindhoven Air Base in the Netherlands.

Eight days earlier, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by the russians over occupied Donbas, Ukraine, using a russian-made Buk ground-to-air missile. 298 people were killed, citizens of nearly a dozen countries.

[mariacallous]

From the order in which members of The Beatles should be listed to the origins of the Pavlova dessert, “edit wars” have dominated Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, since its inception. Though many of these online discussions pertain to cultural icons and phenomena, some have taken a more sinister turn—especially when it comes to controversial or politically sensitive topics such elections, protests, or wars. This has become particularly apparent in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shaped by multiple competing and ever-evolving narratives.

Started in May 2001, the Russian-language Wikipedia is among the world’s top six Wikipedia sites and, until recently, has remained a popular source of information in and about the country. However, over the last two decades, it has become embroiled in controversy, largely due to the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation plaguing the platform.

Reliant on government sources and edited by Russian editors, Russian-language Wikipedia pages have often featured pro-Kremlin narratives, especially in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine. For example, while articles in English have clearly indicated the illegal and disputed nature of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its occupation of Donetsk, the Russian-language pages have previously downplayed the role of the Russian military and portrayed Donetsk as a people’s separatist republic (though it has since been changed and is now consistent with the English version).

Another example is the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. While the English-language version acknowledges that the flight was shot down by the Russian military, which is the international consensus, Russian Wikipedia has called it a “catastrophe” without any attribution of guilt. There are also many inconsistencies having to do with famous historical figures appropriated by Russia, such as those of King Volodymyr the Great or Nestor the Chronicler, both of whom lived in Kyiv.

Over the last two years, Russian courts have fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, several times over content related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, according to a 2022 report, multiple groups of “sock-puppet” editor accounts, which have coordinated their activity to rewrite pages relating to Russian-Ukrainian relations while using false identifiers. These groups have actively undermined Western and Ukrainian information sources and instead endorsed Russian narratives and state-sponsored media.

Though Russia briefly banned Wikipedia in August 2015, it has now taken its digital offensive campaign to the next level.

Earlier this year, Vladimir Medeyko, the former director of Wikimedia Russia, launched an alternative platform called Ruwiki. The new platform started out as a copy-pasted version of the original Russian-language Wikipedia, exploiting a technicality of Wikipedia’s open-source agreement. Today, the new platform contains up to 2 million articles in Russian, as well as 12 other regional languages spoken in Russia, and is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unlike the well-established Wikipedia model, in which any user with internet access can create, edit, or update articles, which then undergo rigorous community moderation, Ruwiki works in a different way. While any user can contribute content, it is subject to review by a narrow circle of undisclosed, likely government-sanctioned “experts” to avoid “mistakes” and adjudicate “complex issues.” But it is no secret which issues are considered “complex” by the Kremlin, whose disinformation machine has been working relentlessly to justify its invasion of Ukraine and vehemently deny the war crimes committed there.

Ruwiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened. Ukraine’s regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and, of course, Crimea are missing from the country’s internationally recognised administrative map. The 2022 Bucha massacre, in which more than 400 Ukrainians were tortured and killed by the Russian military, is explained as an unverifiable “provocation.” And of course, the platform promotes Russia’s official (wrong) narrative that NATO “provoked” the Russian invasion and that NATO soldiers have participated in the war on behalf of Ukraine.

Ruwiki is the perfect example of the “splinternet”—the fragmentation of the global internet into smaller, divergent, and disconnected spaces. Sometimes, splinters form organically on platforms due to cultural and linguistic preferences of their users. But more often, it is a result of targeted government policies that restrict access to certain websites and services in an attempt to curtail free speech. These measures are often undertaken by authoritarian regimes under the guise of digital sovereignty, ensuring the state’s autonomy and control over its communication and digital infrastructures.

In 2011, Iran’s National Information Network (NIN) project, which envisioned the creation of an absolutely independent online ecosystem back in 2011, is a famous case of digital authoritarianism. Another example is Turkey’s new amendments to the Press Law, which came into effect in 2022. The law increased government control over social media and news platforms and has been dubbed as a “draconian” censorship law by media rights activists and opposition leaders.

Similarly, Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law, adopted in 2019, grants the Kremlin the power to isolate the Russian internet from other countries. The law requires Russian internet service providers to hand over many of their powers to the state, including the ability to directly censor unwanted content and prevent users from accessing alternative ways of seeing banned websites.

While these measures to nationalize the internet might seem benign from the perspective of maintaining technological autonomy, such concentration of power in the hands of the state also comes with an unprecedented ability to surveil its domestic population. Since 2019, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has direct access, complete with encryption codes, to access any messages transmitted via Russian social media platforms or stored on servers located within the country.

These splinternets undermine the idea of a unified and global internet. They create isolated pockets of content that is easy to censor and can only be accessed by users from within the state, thus cutting them off from internationally produced content. As numerous studies show, such fragmentation is a pathway to a rapid deterioration of democratic discourse on platforms that institute it.

Take, for example, Truth Social, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media platform, which routinely echoes radical right-wing narratives on immigration, gun ownership, and the 2020 election. Another example is Ukraine’s 2017 decision to ban Russian social media platforms, VK and Odnoklassniki, in the interest of national security, after the platforms had become a toxic cesspool of hate speech, racism, and xenophobia, with well documented calls to rape and murder Ukrainians.

Similarly, in 2022, Russian TikTok blocked all non-Russian content in Russia. Once splintered from the rest of the platform and left unchecked, it became a hotbed of Russian war propaganda.

However, Russian propaganda on TikTok is not limited to its borders alone. Recent research indicates that accounts affiliated with Russian state media, especially Russia Today and Sputnik, have enjoyed a wide international reach, with their content being shared in multiple languages. Once those accounts were flagged by the platform as Russian state-affiliated in 2022, they became inactive and switched to newly created, unlabelled accounts to avoid detection. Another action, which flew under the radar, was Russia’s use of political influencers to sway public opinion in the United States, ahead of its upcoming presidential election.

In light of these disturbing developments, we can reasonably expect to see Ruwiki move along the same historical pathway. Though other countries like China, Turkey, India, and Pakistan have either banned or threatened to ban Wikipedia, Ruwiki’s full control over facts will allow the Kremlin to retell history on its own terms—including denying its war crimes in Ukraine.

This—combined with the targeted destruction of Ukrainian books, the rewriting of Russian school curriculum, and the murder of Ukrainian public intellectuals in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories—will help Russia justify its expansionist goals and cement its colonial dominance over the region.

This digitally mediated historical revisionism is particularly dangerous in light of the increasing use of the internet as the ultimate source of information, especially among Russia’s youth. Splintered from the rest of the world, they will be coming of age in an alternative Kremlin-manufactured version of reality where “nothing is true, but everything is possible.”

[dontforgetukraine]

It's the tenth anniversary of Russia shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine. All 298 passengers and crew were killed. Don't forget it.

[sporadicneckmoneyfan]

Ten years ago, a Malaysia Airlines aircraft carrying passenger flight MH17 from the Netherlands to Malaysia was shot down by Russian forces over the Donetsk region.

All passengers and crew members died, 298 people in total, including 80 children.

On 17 November 2022, the Hague District Court announced its verdict in the case. According to the verdict, Igor Girkin and his subordinates, Sergei Dubinsky and Leonid Kharchenko, were found guilty of the tragedy.

The court also confirmed that Russia was controlling militants in eastern Ukraine when the plane was shot down.

[countriesgame]

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!

If you have any fun fact about Malaysia, please tell us and I'll reblog it!

Be respectful in your comments. You can criticize a government without offending its people.

[mokhosz-nafo]

Exactly 10 years ago. Russia shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine with a BUK surface to air missile. All 298 passengers and crew, of which 196 Dutch people, were killed.

A black day. The world will never forget.. 🕯️

[mariakov81]

Dear westerners. Today is 10 years anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

On 17 July 10 years ago the 298 innocent people, including 80 children, of 17 nationalities were killed by russia.