In a stunning display of either full-on shamelessness or all-out delusion, one of Vladimir Putin’s allies has publicly called for Russia to send more weapons to Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“We must stop the Kyiv regime,” said Andrei Turchak, a member of Putin’s United Russia and first deputy speaker of the upper house of parliament, referring to Ukrainian authorities as a “junta” and proposing “certain weapons” be supplied to stop them. He made the appeal publicly Wednesday, presumably counting on the comments to gain traction in state-run media and rile up the “patriots” who buy his claim that Hitler-loving Nazis are about to “invade” Ukraine’s embattled Donbas, where upward of 14,000 people have died since 2014.
It’s bad enough that Turchak made this proclamation while tens of thousands of Russian troops are assembled along the border with Ukraine and the Kremlin is stoking fears of an invasion.
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And it’s worse that he assumes the world is naïve enough to believe Moscow hasn’t already been sending weapons to the separatists for years. (Just as the Kremlin apparently believed the world was stupid enough to believe it was simply a “mistake” when a Russian court inadvertently outed the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.)
No, the real gut-punch is what is quietly taking place more than 1,500 miles away from Moscow: Relatives of the victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are still trying to get justice for their loved ones and all the 298 people killed when the passenger flight was downed by separatists in the Donbas in 2014.
They were killed by a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile system.
Hearings in Ukraine and the Netherlands’ lawsuit against Russia for the downing of the passenger jet resumed Wednesday in the European Court of Human Rights.
Russia’s envoy at the hearing, Mikhail Vinogradov, asked the court to toss the lawsuit, noting that Moscow does not take responsibility for the plane’s downing.
Moscow is in the minority in believing it had nothing to do with the deadly crash. A years-long investigation using an “immense body of evidence,” including live witnesses and thousands of intercepted phone calls, concluded in 2019 that the missile came from the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade in Kursk. Investigators determined it was delivered into the hands of the separatists only hours earlier, and its launcher stealthily sent back into Russia after the catastrophe—the deadliest passenger plane shootdown in history.
(There is also the inconvenient fact—for Russia, at least—that the separatists proudly boasted on social media about shooting down a Ukrainian transport plane at the same time MH17 went down, only to quickly scrub the post once it became clear they’d hit a passenger plane.)
At least 10 family members of those killed in the incident stood in the court in Strasbourg, France, on Wednesday as the panel began examining the admissibility of the case, according to the Ukrinform news site. In addition to the joint lawsuit by the Netherlands and Ukraine, Russia has also been sued separately by nearly 400 people from 14 different countries who lost loved ones when the plane was shot out of the sky.
If Turchak genuinely believes that Russia “must” send more arms to proxies in Ukraine, it’s reasonable to ask: Did he already forget the hundreds of passengers blasted out of the sky to their deaths by separatists clutching Russian weapons? Or is he just hoping that the rest of the world has?
