RUSSIA 🇷🇺 Thread: Wikileaks=FSB front, UKRAINE?, SNOWED LIED; NATO Aggression; Trump = Putins B!tch

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The Top Secret Scandal Behind the Kremlin’s MH17 Massacre

The Top Secret Scandal Behind the Kremlin’s MH17 Massacre
By John R. Schindler • 05/25/18 12:50pm
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Russia’s President Vladimir Putin speaks during the 2018 St Petersburg International Economic Forum in St Petersburg, Russia on May 25, 2018. Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

I recently ignited a firestorm with my column about the 2010 Smolensk air crash, which killed 99 people and decapitated the Polish government. My recommendation for a new, third-party inquiry into that disaster, based on access to all available evidence, and free of politics, upset some people. I question the motivations of Westerners who dislike Poland’s current government more than Vladimir Putin and his nasty regime, particularly when they masquerade as anti-Kremlin activists.

Moreover, the notion that Putin’s forces would blow up an airliner, without regard for innocent life, is anything but far-fetched. They’ve already done it. I am referring, of course, to the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over eastern Ukraine, an active warzone at the time, on July 17, 2014, killing all 299 passengers and crew aboard the doomed Boeing 777.

Most of them died a horrific death when a missile exploded at the aircraft’s nose as it cruised at 33,000 feet. This explosion killed the pilots instantly and led to the rapid break-up of the Boeing, its pieces falling in flames six miles to earth. Wreckage and mangled bodies were scattered over a 20-square-mile area in the war-torn Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

Dutch nationals made up two-thirds of the dead, 196 persons, so the Netherlands took the lead in the investigation, which published its findings in October 2015. Based on exhaustive examination of the wreckage and all available information, the Dutch report concluded that the Boeing 777 had been taken down by a surface-to-air missile of Russian origin, specifically the 9K37, called Buk (beech tree in Russian). Termed SA-11 by NATO, this is a self-propelled weapons system that provides air defense coverage to Russian ground forces—which was why a Buk was in eastern Ukraine that fateful day, since Putin’s Kremlin had invaded Donetsk earlier that year.

Dutch wreckage analysis left no doubt that a Russian Buk shot down MH17. Shrapnel which could only have come from that system was found in the wreckage and embedded in the bodies of the pilots, who were shredded when the missile exploded just outside their cockpit. No bona fide aviation experts have dissented from Dutch conclusions regarding what brought the Boeing down—or whose missile it was. Although debate continues about why a Russian air defense unit illegally positioned inside Ukraine’s borders brought down a civilian airliner—was it an intentional act or a terrible accident?—that the Russian military was the responsible party is not up for debate in the reality-based community.

For their part, the Kremlin and its propagandists for nearly four years now have played their customary fact-free games of spies and lies, claiming that the gruesome end of MH17 was caused by Ukraine somehow, despite there being zero evidence to back up that assertion. It is an established fact that the missile which killed 299 innocent people was fired by a Russian weapons system located in an area under Russian military occupation that day. No amount of Muscovite disinformation can change that awful reality.

This tragedy is back in the news this week because Dutch investigators have announced that the Russian military’s 53rd Air Defense Missile Brigade was the outfit which shot down MH17. Normally based in Kursk, not far from the border with Ukraine, that brigade was known to have deployed subunits in eastern Ukraine in 2014, so this conclusion is no surprise to anyone who watches Kremlin military news closely. Today, the foreign ministers of the Netherlands and Australia upped the ante, issuing a joint statement holding Russia responsible for this atrocity—Australia lost 27 citizens in the crash—and Western countries are already signing on to this conclusion, with Germany taking the lead. Predictably, the Kremlin is pushing back, implying that it is the victim of a nefarious smear campaign, but there is now so much evidence of Moscow’s guilt in the public domain that the usual Russian disinformation tricks are no longer working in the West outside the ranks of confirmed Putinphiles.

Open-source intelligence analysts have piled on this week as well, with the amateur sleuths at Bellingcat issuing a detailed report which confirms that the 53rd Air Defense Missile was the unit to blame here, while fingering (with some mainstream media help) a senior Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer named Oleg Ivannikov, codenamed Orion, as a key person of interest in the shootdown. Bellingcat’s report includes an impressive amount of detail, some gained from sources in Russia, about Ivannikov’s troubling background as a Russian spy specializing in dirty work.

This is well-done open-source intelligence, but there’s not really much front-page news here. GRU’s involvement in the MH17 shootdown was knownalmost immediately, while within weeks of the catastrophe, Ukrainian intelligence was releasing signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts to the public which left no doubt that the Russian military was behind the shootdown. Moreover, investigative journalists in Germany within a few months of the disaster solidly fingered the 53rd Brigade as the culpable Russian military unit. While it’s good news that Western governments are finally holding Moscow to account for this terrible atrocity, there’s more than a bit of cheek in proclaiming long-ago reported information as breaking.

Then there’s the awkward fact that our Intelligence Community has known the full, terrible story of the MH17 shootdown from practically the moment it happened. Thanks to American acumen in SIGINT and satellite imagery, spies in Washington within mere days of the disaster knew who did it—and how the nightmare unfolded. As reported by The Washington Post only five days after the crash, American intelligence knew that the Kremlin was lying about its innocence in this sordid affair. The Obama White House authorized a limited release of intelligence information, based on “sensors that traced the path of the missile, shrapnel markings on the downed aircraft, voiceprint analysis of separatists claiming credit for the strike, and a flood of photos and other data from social-media sites” as the Post put it, to rebut Kremlin disinformation about the incident.

However, this was a tiny fraction of what our Intelligence Community knew about MH17. As three IC officials have confirmed to me, Washington possessed damning information about the shootdown, including SIGINT which left no doubt that the Russian military—specifically the 53rd Air Defense Missile Brigade—downed the airliner. Detailed, top-secret intelligence from the National Security Agency, which the White House was briefed on within a couple days of the disaster, told the tale. Nevertheless, the Obama administration elected to sit on this bombshell, allowing dishonest Kremlin narratives to gain traction as the public tried to ascertain what exactly had happened to the doomed jetliner.

Although it’s a rare thing for a White House to release top-secret SIGINT to the public to clear the air about an important issue, there’s an eerily exact precedent on hand. On the first day of September 1983, a Soviet jet interceptor downed Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747, close to the Soviet border, killing all 269 passengers and crew. Thanks to its intelligence bases all over the world, NSA within hours had hard evidence of what happened. Signals intercepts proved that the pilot of a Soviet Air Force Su-15 interceptor shot down the Boeing on orders from his superiors, including his chilling report back to his bosses: “The target is destroyed.”

Moscow was denying that it had any idea of what happened to the missing airliner, so President Ronald Reagan decided to push back. Taking a risk, the White House ordered the release of the top-secret NSA intercept to the public, and just five days after the loss of KAL 007, our ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, played the tape before the U. N. Security Council, publicly accusing the Kremlin of mass murder. This was a diplomatic defeat and humiliation of the highest order for the Soviets, tarring the regime with mass murder before the world.

President Barack Obama could have done the same four years ago, letting the world know just what the Kremlin did by releasing relevant intelligence, yet he chose not to do so. The pushback which Western countries are finally mustering over the murder of 299 innocent people, while admirable, is long overdue. It could – and should – have happened in late July 2014, led by the United States. This is just another example of the Obama administration’s troubling unwillingness to confront Putin and his regime over its mounting crimes and misdemeanors. By refusing to take a stand against Russian aggression, President Obama encouraged more of it—culminating in direct Kremlin interference in our 2016 election, with fateful consequences we are living with today.
 
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Outgunned US Army Isn’t Prepared For War With Russia
By John R. Schindler • 08/28/18 4:14pm
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Self-propelled Russian howitzers roll through Moscow’s Red Square. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images

Ever since our lopsided victory in the Gulf War in early 1991, the U.S. military has been venerated by many Americans as an unbeatable force. How rapidly our combined air-ground offensive crushed Saddam’s large yet ponderous army gave the Pentagon an aura of invincibility. Military leaders and defense thinkers proclaimed the dawn of new era in warfare. With our advanced technology and precision strikes, everything was different.

But was it? In hindsight, the Gulf War merely confirmed what military historians always knew, namely that better weaponry and command-and-control habitually crush large numbers of less well-equipped enemies. A generation on, the “lessons” of 1991 appear no more noteworthy than the “lessons” of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, when two brigades of British regulars easily crushed a force of 50,000 jihad-fueled natives because, as the wags of the day put it, “We have got the Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

Yet since the Gulf War, the U.S. Army’s technological edge over its potential foes— what defense doyens term overmatch—has dwindled, slowly but irrevocably. Through the decade after 1991, the army was busy managing post-Cold War cutbacks and peacekeeping in the Balkans and saw no peer-competitors anywhere. Since 9/11, as plausible rivals like Russia and China have slowly come into focus, our army has been busy managing costly and ultimately futile campaigns in the Greater Middle East. Our diffident war in Afghanistan, America’s longest by a good margin, is in its 17th year, and strategic victory is now as far off as it has ever been there.

That American strategy-making is flawed is now painfully evident, but until recently the tactical success of our military seemed at least like a safe assumption. It does no more. A generation of down-punching against third-rate insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq has proved to be poor preparation for combat against enemies who can seriously contest the modern battlefield.

Russia’s military performance in Ukraine since 2014, where the Kremlin’s undeclared war continues on low boil, has proven to be a particular eye-opener for the U.S. Army. In eastern Ukraine, Russian ground forces have demonstrated impressive acumen in electronic warfare, where their ability to rapidly geolocate Ukrainian forces by tracking their communications—including the careless use of mobile phones in the combat zone—has led to the deaths of many Ukrainian troops.

However, our weakness in EW, as the Pentagon terms it, does not surprise. Even in the 1980s, Soviet expertise in what they tellingly term radio-electronic combatoutpaced the U.S. Army’s, while our perennial communications indiscipline, which cost many American lives in Vietnam, shows no signs of going away either. Our army is now trying frantically to catch up with the Russians in EW, but we’re behind a full generation, and achieving parity in the vitally important battle in the ether will prove expensive and time consuming.

Genuinely shocking, though, is how far ahead the Russians have gotten in artillery. That arm is the great killer on the modern battlefield, for over a century now, and Russian gunnery has always been impressive. Their artillery was fearsome in the time of the tsars (“The Irish fight well, but the Russian artillery’s hotter than Hell,” as a popular ditty had it during the Crimean War), and so it has remained. Stalin referred to his guns as “the God of War” and it’s no exaggeration to state that the Red Army in 1944-45 blasted its way clear to Berlin with its massive artillery corps.

But the U.S. Army’s gunnery was no less impressive. Our artillery was the guarantor of victory in the Second World War on all battlefronts. Contrary to Hollywood myth making, the U.S. Army had serious defects in the fight against the Wehrmacht. Outside a few elite units, our infantry was subpar, while our tanks were death traps compared to German models. Our gunnery, however, was world class, and the U.S. Army’s field artillery outpaced Hitler’s gunners in precision and weight of shell. For all his bluster about tanks, General George S. Patton spoke the truth when he stated, “I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know our artillery did.”

It was the same for decades after. In Korea and Vietnam, our field artillery saved the day—and countless lives—time and again, allowing outnumbered American infantry to prevail in battle, while the U.S. Army’s prowess in precise, long-range gunnery crushed Saddam’s army in the Gulf War just the same. That vital overmatch has evaporated since 1991.

In the generation since the Cold War ended, the Russian military has maintained its traditional competence in gunnery, fielding new classes of field artillery, both guns and missiles, while the U.S. Army has stagnated. A brief look at the current situation reveals the extent of the problem. Russian maneuver brigades possess a regiment’s worth of artillery, two battalions of self-propelled 152 mm howitzers plus a battalion of rocket-launchers, 54 artillery pieces in all. In contrast, our heavy brigades possess just a single battalion of no more than 24 155 mm self-propelled howitzers (and in Stryker brigades the howitzers are towed, not self-propelled).

The situation repeats above the brigade level, with the Russians having more artillery pieces and, worse, they customarily outrange American models by a good margin, sometimes twice as much. In terms of range and weight of shell, the Russians today possess alarming advantages over the U.S. Army. Only in target acquisition do we seem to be at an advantage, thanks to drones and better tactical intelligence, but that edge, too, is slipping. Having grown accustomed to drones overhead nonstop, against enemies who cannot shoot them down, the U.S. Army may be in for a rude awakening in a contested fight.

Worst of all, the field artillery branch’s crisis has been building for 15 years, as deployments of gunners as infantry in the Middle East have eroded skills. Not only have new weapons not been acquired, basic gunnery acumen has atrophied among officers and NCOs. A full decade ago, artillery officers were sending up warning flares, with some terming theirs a “dead branch walking.” Nobody took action, so the army’s artillery shortfall is now a national security crisis. Current efforts to make good for a lost generation, trying to catch up to the Russians in gunnery, are promising but long overdue. This crisis was years in the making and will be years in the unmaking.

The U.S. Army should therefore face the prospect of doing battle with Ivan with healthy trepidation for a good while yet. Their track record is not encouraging. Historically, our army has a habit of losing opening battles, often badly, due to unreadiness, as at Kasserine Pass in early 1943 and with Task Force Smith in the summer of 1950. In the past, there has always been time to learn lessons from defeat and catch up. The next time there may not be.

Underestimating the Russians, particularly in gunnery, has a long and undistinguished history. In the summer of 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Army went to war against the tsar’s forces with unwarranted confidence. Vienna’s artillery situation resembled ours today, with their units facing Russians armed with more, better, and longer-ranged guns. Disaster followed, as recounted in my recent book Fall of the Double Eagle, with Habsburg forces being literally blasted off the battlefields of Galicia by superior enemy artillery. Austria-Hungary lost 420,000 men in just three weeks, the entire strength of the prewar army, and never recovered. This is the fate the U.S. Army must avoid.
 
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