To update, the United States claims Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Donetsk by a surface-to-air missile.

This brings back to light an issue that had been largely ignored by the media for the past few months, mostly because of the crisis in the Middle East. But is this the conflict in Ukraine flaring up again? Personally I don't think this will have much of an effect, but what do you think?

At 7/17/14 05:08 PM, Ranger2 wrote: This brings back to light an issue that had been largely ignored by the media for the past few months, mostly because of the crisis in the Middle East. But is this the conflict in Ukraine flaring up again? Personally I don't think this will have much of an effect, but what do you think?

This is an unfortunate result of what happens when a bunch of undisciplined trigger happy grunts get a hold of extremely powerful and dangerous military hardware they barely know how to use. You take a gamble when you fight proxy wars and this is a perfect example as to why. As for what happens, that directly depends on who fired what -- if Russian separatists brought down the plane with an SA-20, for example, then the implications are much larger, since the SA-20 is specifically a Russian SAM. Under this hypothetical, this would ultimately mean that Russia directly supplied these separatists and ostensibly supplied them with the training on how to use it.

In the end the response will be muted and will most likely be constrained to further sanctions, because at the end of the day Russia matters and Ukraine doesn't. It's sad but that's just how it is. There, of course, will be no direct military escalation on behalf of NATO against Russia.

Sadly, the plane was shot down. Probably a SA-11 missile, Ukrainian military and Donetsk rebels blame each other. Even more sadly, the rebels can be involved, there was info a short time ago that they've captured several SA-11 launchers. Now (after the catastrophe) those tweets are deleted.

At 4/5/15 07:13 PM, Ocelot wrote: The question that looms: why was the plane flying over a designated warzone with a high-risk level?

Because the alternate route would've gone over Syria, so I guess they thought that Ukraine was more safe.