(Also published at Sic Semper Tyrannis. Picked up by JRL/2018/171/27)

My thoughts on yesterday’s Russian MoD briefing.

1. The Russians have powerfully argued (and the logbooks are ready for inspection if you think they’re forged. Ought to be possible to show they really are 30 years old) that the Buk fragments suddenly discovered by Ukraine in May are from a missile that has always been in Ukraine. (Personally, I remain to be convinced that a Buk brought it down: not enough “bowtie” fragments.)
2. The videos are fake. The sightline evidence is, to my mind, apodictic. I’ve seen other arguments that they are fake but these are the most convincing. (I do like the backwards driving TEL).
3. The voice recording. Well, we’ll see. But don’t forget the Ukrainians did shoot down a civilian airliner in 2001 and lied about it until they could lie no longer.
4. Why have the Russians waited until now? Well the missile fragments only appeared in May, and it would take some time to search through all these mouldy old paper booklets to find it and there’s the usual security BS in clearing SS documents. As to the rest, all I can assume is that the Russians decided they might as well tack them on too.
5. Notice the hint that they have the radar info. (Kiev’s official line was that everything was down for maintenance.)

I expect the West/JIT to just pretend this never was said. But (one can naively hope) that now that the Netherlands have stopped supporting AQ-in-Syria and the “white helmets” that… maybe….

…but NO. Too naive of me. Too many lies, too hard to back out of them.

The West is lost and it won’t happen.

Addendum 19 Sep

Petri Krohn is unconvinced by the vanishing point argument pointing out that the Buk TEL does not sit flat on the trailer. But the vanishing point for the truck itself is wrong as the picture below shows. (Video at 15:03) The picture shows three vanishing points – the true one (green), the truck’s (blue) and the Buk TEL’s (yellow).

The second thing that occurs to me is that the Russians are now looking for the log book for all the rest of the missile: warhead, guidance system, fusing system and so forth which would (as far as I know) have been made in different factories.

Why would they keep such detailed notes? If a missile misfired they would want to be able to check all the missiles from that batch in order to see if they were defective too. Plus, in the full employment Soviet system, there were lots of jobs that didn’t necessarily make much economic sense from a free enterprise perspective.