How I remember MH17
17 July marks the anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in eastern Ukraine in 2014. All 298 on board, mostly Dutch, Malaysians, and Australians were killed. I had just finished up with a short term job interstate and was looking for further employment at the time, and had the time to follow the reporting of the incident online. In 2014, I would not have guessed that the event would shape my view of discourse and disinformation in eastern Europe for years to come. Ukraine was on the other side of the world and I had no real interest or understanding of the invasion by Russia back then, but people from my country were on that plane, so I paid attention. The blame game started in earnest.
‘Ukraine fired the missile.’
‘Russia fired the missile’
‘It was an accident.’
‘The Ukrainians are looting the crash site.’
‘The Russians are looting the crash site.’
‘Malaysian Airlines was at fault and shouldn’t have been flying over a warzone.’
‘The pilot was at fault.’
‘The investigation is biased towards Russia/Ukraine/Malaysia/Australia/Netherlands...’
‘Russia/Ukraine tampered with evidence...’
It even got ugly in some less reputable ‘news’ sites and far right conspiracy theories spread online, that it was the ‘missing’ MH370 that crashed into the sea months earlier, that the US did it because reasons, islamophobia, men in black, hijackers, crisis actors, aliens... As a queer person, I paid attention to the fact that several AIDS researchers were on board, and stigma surrounding AIDS was and is still very rife, which fed into the more extreme discourse. The world wanted answers.
Round and round it went. It did eventually emerge that Russia, or ‘separatists’ - really Russian proxies - fired the missile, from a Buk launcher that was later filmed being carted back to Russia carrying three missiles instead of its usual four. The billboard was used to geolocate the truck and Buk’s to the border.
Pardon my terrible MSPaint edit.
The still image is grabbed from a video that was posted by Ukraine’s Defense ministry, but forms part of a broader investigation by Bellingcat, an independent collective of open source researchers, that is too detailed to write here but tracked the movements of the Buk and the truck carrying it to and from the launch site. (link: https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/)
There was nothing wrong with the plane, the pilot, or the flight path. Passenger planes from Air France, Air India and Singapore Airlines were transiting nearby.
Now, it was obvious that MH17 wasn’t an intentional target. The commanders of the brigade that the Buk belonged to initially posted on social media that they had downed a Ukrainian fighter jet, and then rapidly deleted their celebratory comments when photos of the wreckage appeared online. In my mind, all Russia had to do was acknowledge it was a mistake, or a mistake by ‘separatists’, court martial the guy who pulled the trigger, apologise and fork out some form of compensation. Install a plaque at the site, send flowers, and the world would have eventually looked away from the not-really-civil-war in faraway eastern Europe and their brush with a southeast Asian airline.
Why the lies? Acknowledging the mistake would have been magnitudes cheaper and simpler than the overall war effort. Why was continuing to perpetuate a firehose of falsehoods more important than the truth and trying to repair relations? I couldn’t answer those questions then, but now realise that keeping the information space muddied and flooded with crap is now the norm for disinformation coming out of Russia. Its like they can’t help themselves.
Fast forward to today.
The ‘separatist’ commanders are still involved in the invasion of Ukraine, now unmasked as regular Russians. No commercial flights operate over the country for now. Disinformation, so heavily weaponised during the long months of pandemic lockdown and the former president of the US, runs rife. I posted my own little memorials to the tragedy on social media, year after year, and got bot farm and troll reactions downvoting or pushing them into invisibility. I’m not important enough in the big scheme of things to have a flesh and blood russian troll come to debate me, not that I have the time and energy for it. I’m also not the only person who refuses to forget it, even if the loss pales in significance to the atrocities perpetuated on Ukraine from last year. The lies meant that when the 2022 invasion started along with the inevitable discourse, we also remembered which side was more likely to be lying. The Netherlands and Australia are very supportive of Ukraine, Malaysia is officially neutral (mostly due to convoluted reasoning of America = bad imperialists, America supports Ukraine, so supporting Russia good etc) though many individuals still go against the grain to donate or volunteer. I can’t change what others think, but at least I can prevent them from forgetting.
