Kermit Heartsong - Ukraine - ZBIG's Grand Chess Board & How The West Was Checkmated

Also on that day, 200 US Army personnel were participating in a second NATO led exercise, Rapid Trident II, in conjunction with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, during the downing of flight MH17.

It was also pointed out, during a Russian military press conference, that at the precise time flight MH17 was downed, a US experimental spy satellite was positioned directly overhead. And using measurement and signature intelligence, or MASINT, the satellite would have easily been able to detect the heat signature of a missile launch or the missile’s internal search and tracking system as it sought to engage the intended target (Vartabedian 2014).

In addition to all of the above, the US Air Force continually maintains a fleet of listening and early warning satellites that would have easily identified both the location of the missile launch site as well as its trajectory (Vartabedian 2014).

Further, Kiev’s commercial and military radar systems should have also easily been able to identify missiles rising to 33,000 ft. as well as a second aircraft trailing flight MH17 (which will be discussed later in detail).

Russia, of course, would have also been able to track flight MH17’s flight path via civilian and military radar and satellite telemetry.

To date, however, only the Russian military has shared with the world its forensic evidence and satellite data on flight MH17 in a military press briefing. It is the only such press briefing by any country on flight MH17, as of the date of this book’s release.

As of the release of this book, the US, NATO nor any EU country has held a press briefing or shared a scintilla of forensic data — satellite telemetry, radar images, black box data, ATC tapes, or any data — that may have been gathered by its various intelligence assets in the area on the day of the downing of flight MH17.

the Russian position

On July 18, the Russian Defense Ministry held a press briefing on Malaysian Flight MH17 that was conducted by Russian Minister of Defense, Andrey Karatopolov, and Russian Defense Minister of General Staff Air Force, Igor Makushev. It would be the first and only such press conference that provided a worldwide audience with radar and satellite data on the various movements of flight MH17 until it was downed.

Also uncovered during this press briefing, as seen on radar-tracking tapes, was the appearance of a second plane — a military plane (as it did not have a secondary identification device), an SU-25, which the Ukrainian authorities have continually denied. The SU-25, visible as a radar blip, appeared to be in hot pursuit of Flight MH17.

At no point during the Russian Defense Ministry press conference was there any sign of a launched missile on their radar or satellite telemetry data.

After the press conference, Defense Minister Karatopolov, without placing blame, simply asked the Ukrainian authorities for clarification on ten questions, which he believed they’d be able to answer given ATC tapes (RT 2014):

1. Immediately after the tragedy, the Ukrainian authorities, naturally, blamed it on the self-defense forces. What are these accusations based on?

2. Can Kiev explain in detail how it uses BUK missile launchers in the conflict zone? And why were these systems deployed there in the first place, seeing as the self-defense forces don’t have any planes?

3. Why are the Ukrainian authorities not doing anything to set up an international commission? When will such a commission begin its work?

4. Would the Ukrainian Armed Forces be willing to let international investigators see the inventory of their air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, including those used in SAM launchers?

5. Will the international commission have access to tracking data from reliable sources regarding the movements of Ukrainian warplanes on the day of the tragedy?

6. Why did Ukrainian air traffic controllers allow the plane to deviate from the regular route to the north, towards “the anti-terrorist operation zone?”

7. Why was airspace over the war zone not closed for civilian flights, especially since the area was not entirely covered by radar navigation systems?

8. How can official Kiev comment on reports in the social media, allegedly by a Spanish air traffic controller who works in Ukraine, that there were two Ukrainian military planes flying alongside the Boeing 777 over Ukrainian territory?

9. Why did Ukraine’s Security Service start working with the recordings of communications between Ukrainian air traffic controllers and the Boeing crew and with the data storage systems from Ukrainian radars without waiting for international investigators?

10. What lessons has Ukraine learned from a similar incident in 2001, when a Russian Tu-154 crashed into the Black Sea? Back then, the Ukrainian authorities denied any involvement on the part of Ukraine’s armed forces until irrefutable evidence proved official Kiev to be guilty.

The Russian deputy defense minister refused to assign blame until an investigation was undertaken and more evidence found. This despite the fact that less than twenty-four hours earlier Western governments and Western media, with no evidence and prior to an official investigation or forensic press briefing, were placing the blame on Russia, the Eastern Ukraine, and President Putin.

the Kiev and US position

We know, we saw in social media afterwards, we saw videos, we saw photos of the pro-Russian separatists bragging about shooting down an aircraft that then they then…excuse me, took down once it became clear that it may have been a passenger airline… Based on open information which is basically common sense, right, we know where it was fired from, we know who has this weapon.

— Marie Harf, US State Department Spokesperson

Again, less than twenty-four hours after the downing of Malaysian Flight MH17, prior to an investigation, an examination of the flight data recorders, or the presentation of any forensic evidence, the West made its case against Russia and the Novorossiyan Separatists. The case made by US Secretary of State John Kerry alleged that:

•A SA-11 surface-to-air missile system, BUK, was in the vicinity, under the control of East Ukrainian Separatists

•A launch was detected and its trajectory vector verified to have intercepted Flight MH17 (Corbett 2014)

The data verifying the launch and its trajectory, however, seems to have disappeared with Harf’s mountain of evidence, as, to date, neither have seen the light of day.

The Kiev regime for its part attempted to substantiate the points made by Secretary Kerry by providing 1) an intercepted conversation between an Eastern Separatist and a colonel from Russian military intelligence and 2) by showing a video of a BUK missile system, without two of its missiles, supposedly heading back across the Russian border.

However, within twenty-four hours the intercepted conversation that had been uploaded by Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) was discovered to have been pieced together from disparate, unrelated conversations.

A Russian expert in sound and voice analysis, Nikolai Popov (2014), after studying the tapes, confirmed that the recording that had been submitted by the SBU was, “Not an integral file and made up of several fragments.”

In the first fragment a Ukrainian Separatist Commander, Igor Belzer, talks about shooting down a plane. He does not, however, mention anything about the type of plane or the name of the town. The tape’s second fragment, the experts discovered, was composed of three disparate pieces that are presented as a single conversation. This was discovered using a spectral and time analysis of the recordings. As Popov notes:

Short pauses in the tape are very indicative: the audio file has preserved time marks which show that the dialog was assembled from various episodes. But the most indicative moment is that the audio tape clearly shows that it was created almost a day before the airliner crash (ITAR-TASS 2014)