I don't think Russia has much to do with it

Yesterday's news that long-range anti-aircraft rockets, apparently fired from Russia, downed a Ukrainian transport plane flying at 21,000ft, is worrying. Today, a Ukrainian jet bombed allegedly separatists in Snizhne, near Donetsk. Take a look at eastern Ukraine on FlightRadar24.com, and you'll see a procession of civilian aircraft flying along an air corridor between Luhansk, Donetsk, Horlivka, Kramatorsk - places where battles are raging and people are being killed. Yet blithely oblivious to what's happening on the ground, some of the world's largest civilian airliners are criss-crossing the area at 38,000ft.

Below: a Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A330, followed by a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380, flying over the battlefields below. Other planes from India, Malaysia, Qatar, Austria, Germany are also overflying this area (click to enlarge). Eddie reminds me of the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by

Ukraine Says Rebels Spoke of Crash in Intercepted Calls

Ukraine’s intelligence agency — the State Security Service, known as the S.B.U. — just released what it said was audio from intercepted phone calls between separatist rebels and Russian military intelligence officers on Thursday, in which they appeared to acknowledge shooting down a civilian plane.

The Ukrainian foreign ministry sent reporters a link to the edited audio of the calls posted on YouTube, with English subtitles, by the S.B.U.

According to a translation of the Russian audio by the English-language Kyiv Post, the recording begins with a separatist commander, Igor Bezler, telling a Russian military intelligence official, “We have just shot down a plane.”

In another call, a man who seems to be at the scene says that a group of Cossack militiamen shot down the plane. He adds that it was a passenger plane and that the debris contains no sign of any military equipment. Asked if there are any weapons, he says: “Absolutely nothing. Civilian items, medical equipment, towels, toilet paper.”

Asked if there are any documents among the debris, the man says, “Yes, of one Indonesian student.”

Myroslava Petsa, a Ukrainian journalist in Kiev, said that the rebels sounded shocked by what they found in the wreckage.

Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was allegedly shot down by a group of Russian-backed Cossack militants near the village of Chornukhine, Luhansk Oblast, some 80 kilometers north-west of Donetsk, according to recordings of intercepted phone calls between Russian military intelligence officers and members of terrorist groups, released by the country’s security agency (SBU).

One phone call apparently was made at 4:40 p.m. Kyiv time, or 20 minutes after the plane crash, by Igor Bezler, who the SBU says is a Russian military intelligence officer and leading commander of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. He reports to a person identified by Ukraine’s SBU as a colonel in the main intelligence department of the general headquarters of the armed forces of the Russian Federation Vasili Geranin regarding the shot down plane, which is about to be examined by the militants.

The unenviable reputation of the Cossacks as brutal executioners in the Czar's service originated from this phase of their service in the Russian Army. Three Russian words -- the pogrom, the knut (or nagaika) and the Cossack -- entered hand in hand into the pages of Western dictionaries and school books. The impression was created and universally accepted that the Cossacks conducted the pogroms and terrified the Jewish population of the western provinces of Russia

Anyone who can read spanish - is it legit?