Lex de Groot

10 years since the Russian downing of the MH17 flight over occupied Ukraine. Acts of wickedness produce even more evil. So, amid a filthy undeclared war in Ukraine's Donbas, while arming and leading proxy armies against Ukraine and vehemently denying its involvement (that it boasts about as its 'brilliant special operations' now), amid typical Soviet-style mess and incompetence -- the unmarked Russian military personnel and their "retired" proxy militants accidentally downed a Boeing full of innocent people from all around the world. Not only did they boast about that (mistaking a civilian Boeing for a Ukrainian military aircraft), not only did they pose for pictures amid the debris, not only did they restrict access of international monitors to the crash scene. What followed was genuinely the most shameless, outrageous, and heinous campaigns of lies, propaganda, and disinformation in modern history. You all remember that kaleidoscope of the most idiotic "versions" thrown in by the Kremlin to create a wall of media white noise over the catastrophe -- from lame photoshopped fake images of "a Ukrainian Su-25 downing the Boeing" to "air traffic controller Carlos" (who was later exposed as a wanted Spanish small-time fraudster paid by Russia Today) and to the "airplane full of dead bodies" purposefully crashed to compromise Russia. Up to this day, Putin and his frauds continue juggling with all sorts of wild conspiracy theories possible over the MH-17 downing. A never-ending torrent of dumb lies that fail to stand up to the simplest verification, again and again, for 10 years. Everyone is to blame, from Ukraine to international air traffic regulations -- but not Russia, which secretly brought a Buk-M1 surface-to-air system from Russia's 53rd Guards Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade to occupied Donbas to be used against Ukraine. And of course, in July 2015, Russia vetoed the inception of an international tribunal at the UN Security Council -- of course, it was because there was a global anti-Russian conspiracy in having a proper, internationally controlled investigation of the downing. Yet, thanks to @bellingcat, the Joint Investigation Team, and the Dutch Safety Board, we know everything about what happened on that day in 2014. We know in detail how the Buk was transported from Russia to occupied Donbas and who was doing it. We know who was using it and where exactly it was from. We know how exactly it downed the MH-17, killing 298 people, and we know how Russians were hastily trying to get rid of incriminating evidence, particularly the very Buk-M1 system, after they realized what had just happened. All facts, unlike the avalanches of Russian propaganda sprees, were carefully verified many times over by journalists and court investigators. Pictures, phone calls, satellite images, reconstructed chains of events, technical expertise. Yet, no one has been held responsible for the worst air crash of the 21st century. The evil was never punished for inciting a regional proxy war and the downing of a civilian airliner. Unpunished, it returned to unleash the worst European war of aggression since WWII, with hundreds of thousands dead and entire cities and regions turned into mass graves amid debris. What will it do next as it stays unpunished again and again?