US Aims at Blowing EU-Russia Rift with Downed Airliner

Saturday, July 19, 2014
By Paul Martin

Finian CUNNINGHAM
Strategic-Culture.org
19.07.2014

The downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine with the loss of all 298 onboard comes amid mounting frustration between Washington and its European allies over the imposition of further trade sanctions on Russia.

Days before the doomed flight, American officials were quietly voicing their agitation at European leaders’ reluctance to apply sanctions that would hit Russia’s key economic sectors.

While media reports earlier this week suggested that the US and the European Union were adopting a «united front» in the ramping up of penalties on Moscow, the underlying reality was very different. EU leaders were actually telling media that they were not yet ready to go beyond existing sanctions against Russian individuals, by following Washington’s latest measures against Russia’s energy, banking and defence sectors.

Now various Western media pundits are talking of a «game-changer» with the downing of the Malaysian Boeing 777 near Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. The flight was most likely hit by a sophisticated surface-to-air missile while cruising at a mid-air altitude of 10,000 meters (33,000 feet).

Perhaps significantly, most of the passengers onboard the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were European nationals, mainly from the Netherlands and Britain, as well as Germany and Belgium. At over 170 passengers, the Dutch contingency was the largest onboard.

Let’s step back a bit. Following the Western-backed illegal coup in Ukraine on February 23, geopolitical tensions escalated further during March when the southern Crimea Peninsula voted in a referendum to join the Russian Federation. Washington and its European allies immediately launched vitriolic attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin for what they said was «an illegal annexation» of Ukrainian territory. Western media chimed in with lurid claims that Putin was the «new Hitler» and that the Russian leader was trying to resurrect the old Soviet Union.

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