MEET ELIOT HIGGINS, PUTIN'S MH17 NEMESIS
Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/meet-eliot-higgins-putins-mh17-nemesis-345485
What has mainly provoked the Kremlins ire is Bellingcats work on Flight MH17, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 shot down over eastern Ukraine last summer, killing all 298 people on board.
Russian officials were quick to blame the flights destruction on Ukrainian forces. But over the past year, Higgins and his cohorts have been systematically debunking Moscows version of events. With the European Union reviewing its sanctions against Russia ahead of the July 17 anniversary of the crash, Higgins is about to release a new report, The Other Faces of MH17, in the hope of further discrediting Moscows claims.
Because the Russians are lying about so much stuff, theres so much to debunk, he says. If they werent...I probably would have gotten bored quickly.
The lies, Bellingcat says, started with a press conference last summer which the Kremlin claimed a Ukrainian Su-25 fighter jet shot down the passenger plane. Russias Defense Ministry presented radar data appearing to show another aircraft in the vicinity of MH17, and the Russian Union of Engineers said wreckage indicated the plane was destroyed by heat-seeking air-to-air missiles. A man claiming to be a Spanish air traffic controller in Kiev even gave interviews to the Russian media, saying two Ukrainian fighter jets had followed the Malaysian plane. Then a satellite image appeared, apparently showing an aircraft firing on the airliner.
Gradually, however, each piece of this evidence was proved to be fraudulent. The Spanish Embassy said there was no Spanish air traffic controller at either of Kievs airports. Experts dismissed the radar blip as falling debris from MH17. One of the Russian designers of the Su-25 stated publicly that the aircraft could not fire at a target flying at the passenger jets altitude, and that only a surface-to-air missile could cause the plane to break apart as it did. Finally, Bellingcat exposed that satellite photo as a crude composite of Google images, with the Malaysian Airlines logo not even correctly placed on the aircraft.
[...]
Never without a Plan B, Russia switched to an alternate theoryMH17 was hit by a Buk missile, but it was launched from Ukrainian territory and fired by troops loyal to Kiev. Once again, the Kremlin offered satellite images to back it up. But Bellingcat purchased its own satellite images, again indicating the Russian ones had been digitally altered. Russias Ministry of Defense did not respond to telephone or email requests from Newsweek for comment on Bellingcats findings.
"The Russian propaganda technique is to flood the Web with huge amounts of misinformation in an effort to undermine genuine facts, says Vitaliy Naida, a senior official at Ukraines state security service.
The aim is to constantly raise new questions and make absolute truth seem unattainable."
BBM
The downing of MH17 saw the rise of Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat :tyou:
