Yes, on this I agree....they quite simply shot down the "WRONG" airplane. It is evident in the intercepted recordings of their communications, after the incident.
The "aim" was (to them) a "military" target. They got it wrong. Chaos ensues.
The separatists had shot down several planes already in recent times. Since retaking some of Luhansk, Kiev had to supply some encircled troops by air, so transports coming in would have been fairly regular. Commonsense says they'd have someone(s) to alert them of aircraft approaching their positions. They are not a well resourced professional force; claims about Russian help notwithstanding, they seem to have been getting some of their armour, BUKs, transport lowloaders etc by capture from the Government or "borrowing" from the population. So it would make sense for the alert to come by recordable public phone line. It does NOT make sense for the spies to not find the "bird coming your way" recording for nearly 2 weeks. Occam says discount this recording.
The FIRST intercepted recording I accept as genuine, purely on how very very true it rings. Every word of it. It went like this (colloquialised). YAY!! we got another Antonov!!!....near the coalmine..... Oh shit.....you sure?....oh... oh... It was the Cossacks in the village had the rocket, it was them that done it.... [passing the BUK
] .....maybe it had spies on it? ....[boss not buying that]...uhmm....[lightbulb moment] .... some fighters were harrassing the jetliner we tried to shoot them to save the big one, we're out looking for the downed fighter. .........
Subsequent calls from that phone, which they must have KNOWN after this to be intercepted ... well some may be real (they have little choice) and some faked. The blabbering about the old corpses with the blood drained, and the CT type explanations, were genuine. The speaker had not been there, he was going on reports from men in the field, none of whom would know what sort of corpses to expect from the type of deaths involved -- high pressure shock wave, high temperature + immediate freezing gives you swollen bluish bodies that don't bleed. Even the nakedness may have looked unnatural, ie they'd have expected live people in a plane to be wearing clothes. Only the pilots had blood on them, they said. That is what I would expect, knowing what we know of how events unfolded. The wild guesses as to why there'd be old corpses? same as all our other CTs, an attempt to make some sense of a situation they had no scientific education, experience or explanation for.
That first call does give a walks like a duck impression, considering earlier recent shootdowns. BUT. BUT. They're a mixture of patriots, agent provocateurs, mercenaries and "radicalised" ie ones who signed up after they started getting bombarded. Loosely united semi-autonomous groups. One group may not know where another group is or what they're armed with. The guy bignoting himself with the boss would not have issued a command for the shootdown (these were getting to be routine by now). Nor even had it reported to him. Or reported by someone who saw the fireball, not by someone who shot it. He just knew a plane was down, and thought "walks like a duck.... must have been US getting one of THEM. Like, I mean, really, who else could it be, amiright?" .... oh shit.....
Occam says: considering local and human factors, that recorded call, although genuine, cannot be taken as an admission of causation. The Twitter post ditto. It's not just Western media that likes to be first with the (wrong) news. Equally likely just taking credit, on the same
duck basis everyone else used to pile on blame.
It might still have been them, by accident -- the village where he said the "Cossacks have the rocket" happens to be about 9 or 10 miles west nor' west of where MH17 was hit, a BUK location nobody's thought to mention.
