Manuel Ochsenreiter joins Richard to discuss the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17: the knowns, the unknowns, and the geopolitical implications. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| Manuel, thank you for being back on the program. | |
| Welcome. | |
| Well, Manuel, I want to talk about the recent tragedy that occurred in Ukraine, and that is the downing of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 on July 17th of this year. | |
| And before we get into interpretation and get into some of the possibilities, why don't you just... | |
| Tell our listeners objectively what happened. | |
| Because here in America and in Western Europe, we've seen headlines like Putin's Missile, which was put on some British tabloid between photos of Kim Kardashian's bikini body. | |
| And there's been a lot of misinformation going on. | |
| Again, before we get into interpretation, why don't you just say as objectively as possible what happened? | |
| Well, I think it's a very quick thing to tell what happened. | |
| A civilian airplane with almost 300 passengers was flying over the battle zone of eastern Ukraine, where the war is going on now since months. | |
| And was obviously shot down by something, by a rocket, by whatever, and crushed, and all the passengers died. | |
| So this is what we know for sure until today, and that's it already. | |
| So what do you think happened? | |
| Listening to the American media, when it first happened, there were a lot of insinuations that this was Putin's missile, as I mentioned earlier, that this was some malicious Russian plot. | |
| For what end, I don't understand. | |
| But I think there's been a more general consensus in the Western and American media. | |
| That the plane was brought down most likely by mistake by what, in their words, are Russian-backed militants or Russian-backed separatists. | |
| And that they have downed, these are the separatists in eastern Ukraine who don't want to be a part of the Kiev government and who are being viciously attacked by the Kiev government. | |
| And that they, by accident, shot down this plane with an air-to-surface defense system. | |
| The BUK, I think, is what is. | |
| But so why don't we just talk about that? | |
| Do you think that that is a probable or plausible scenario? | |
| I think we are right now in the situation that one of the most unlikely scenarios, and that is the scenario you told, that was so-called pro-Russian separatists. | |
| who are local defense forces. | |
| They are right now doing a war against the Ukrainian army and against paramilitary units who are connected to the Ukrainian army in that region. | |
| So... | |
| To connect that to the so-called pro-Russian separatists that they downed by accident or on purpose, both things are in the Western mainstream media already mentioned, by the way. | |
| It's a very... | |
| Unlikely scenario. | |
| It is unlikely because the plane was flying more than 10,000 meters above the ground, and you need for this just certain weaponry systems. | |
| So what we hear always is this BUK weapon system. | |
| And at the beginning, the West accused those people's defense militias that they stole or that they captured one of those BOK weapon systems and that they shot down the plane with that weaponry system. | |
| Today we know, and we know this because of the Kiev government, the prosecutor general mentioned it himself in an interview. | |
| He said that not just one single BUK weaponry system of the Ukrainian army was getting lost somehow in the war. | |
| So we can say for sure it's very unlikely that these pro-Russian fighters had the weaponry system to down that airplane. | |
| They don't have an interest. | |
| To down that airplane. | |
| So we can exclude that. | |
| And I even think we could exclude this from both sides because nobody has an interest to kill 300 civilians. | |
| Right now in Western mainstream media, it seems like the most unlikely conspiracy theory is presented as the truth. | |
| But this is not new, by the way. | |
| When we look back, for example, just last year in fall, we had the chemical attack in Syria, in Gauta, where the West accused the Syrian army that they used chemical weapons against rebels and against civilians, where not just one single evidence was given that those weapons were really used by the Syrian government. | |
| But anyway, they were accused, they did that, and this was maybe the most unlikely conspiracy theory because also the Syrian government has no interest at all to do so and the West in particular Barack Obama was calling chemical weapons as the so-called red line so then the West has to interfere in a military way so the Syrian government didn't have any interest to use those weapons especially at the same time when | |
| that happened in Gauta it was the time when inspectors UN inspectors were in I think we can compare this now as well. | |
| The West is very quick with accusations. | |
| In Germany, by the way, the newspapers... | |
| Especially the yellow press is doing the same campaign, but also Western politicians. | |
| I think we both are used to that Western politicians know immediately who committed a crime or who committed a war crime before any investigation takes place. | |
| Yes, I agree. | |
| Well, let's talk about cui bono, that is, who benefits, because I think that is one of the most... | |
| Precise means of getting at the truth of something. | |
| And again, that's not a definitive answer to any question. | |
| But I think it can often really help us understand. | |
| And I agree that the Russian separatists do not benefit in the slightest by downing a civilian aircraft. | |
| It makes them seem like crazies. | |
| It makes them seem like awful people. | |
| It just does not make sense. | |
| Do you think that the Ukrainian government might have thought that they could have benefited by the downing of this airplane in the sense that it It brings the Ukrainian conflict back into the public consciousness, it brings it back onto the front page of papers and websites, | |
| and that this could be used as kind of a 9-11-like tragedy, and it might make it more likely that NATO or some kind of constellation of forces would intervene on their behalf directly. | |
| Do you think that that is a plausible scenario? | |
| I think there are two important aspects when we discuss this. | |
| So aspect number one is that it is less unlikely that the Ukrainian military shot that plane down than that the so-called pro-Russian separatists shot it down. | |
| More likely that the Ukrainians did it. | |
| Now, without any interest, without any other things, when we speak about the means, when we speak about the opportunity to do so, when we speak about the ability. | |
| So this is much more likely that the Ukrainians did it. | |
| And when we look now to the second aspect, the second aspect is, in my opinion, the more important one. | |
| It is that we see that the Ukrainian government tries since months to provoke Russia, to provoke Moscow, to provoke the Russian military to get into a sort of open war against Ukraine. | |
| Now we can discuss why should somebody do so? | |
| I mean, isn't that crazy when you have a Ukraine, a little state, if you compare it to Russia, you have a weak military, you have the Russian strong military. | |
| So why would you do such a suicidal thing to provoke your strong neighbor to do so? | |
| So you must have an interest to do that. | |
| So what is very likely is... | |
| Yeah. | |
| Thank you. | |
| The United States, but as well United Kingdom, they are also very much involved in this, that they say in case of an open war, you will get our full support. | |
| So when we see now that within the last four months, there were countless violations of the Ukrainian-Russian border by the Ukrainian side. | |
| So there were Russian border guards were shot, there were shellings coming to the Russian border. | |
| There were so many provocations to provoke the Russian. | |
| Maybe just to go a couple of kilometers on Ukrainian territory to stop those attacks. | |
| But this would, of course, be the casus belli, officially. | |
| So Russia is in that situation that they don't let provoke themselves. | |
| Since months, they stay strong. | |
| At the same time... | |
| The fighters in eastern Ukraine, the pro-Russian fighters, call Moscow desperately for help. | |
| They say they should come, they should establish a non-flight zone or a sort of humanitarian corridor. | |
| So this is also an aspect. | |
| And when we see now the reaction, the international reaction on... | |
| We see that Russia was blamed immediately before the first observer, before the first investigator was seeing the first little part of the plane. | |
| The Western mainstream media and the Western politics knew already exactly that it was Putin himself who gave the order. | |
| This is what we can read. | |
| This is what we can read everywhere. | |
| So it fits in this bigger scenario. | |
| To provoke Russia, to demonize Russia, of course. | |
| To demonize Russia, it's a barbarian country. | |
| It's a country where civilian airplanes are shot down for no reason. | |
| And, of course, when we see this all in this context, it's the Ukrainian government which benefits of the campaign now and which would benefit as well if Russia is provoked enough and would do, maybe in the eyes... | |
| Yes. | |
| I'm not exactly certain that Washington and Barack Obama and NATO would actually directly intervene in a Ukrainian campaign. | |
| Great deal of war-wariness, obviously amongst the public, but I think also amongst Barack Obama and I think a lot of people. | |
| I think there are different factions within Washington. | |
| There's without question a neoconservative and neoliberal faction, someone like Victoria Nuland being maybe the most obvious example, that would really love to intervene in Ukraine and maybe even get in an open war with Russia. | |
| But I think I'm just simply not certain that the president, with his veto power, would want to do that. | |
| I don't think it's about now an open war against Russia, that if Russia would... | |
| If a Russian soldier would stab his boot on Ukrainian soul in a very official way, that it would automatically cause a war between Russia and the West. | |
| I think something else. | |
| I think that in that moment, several agreements would become valuable. | |
| For example, we know very well that the Kiev government is completely bankrupt. | |
| So that state has no money at all. | |
| But in that moment, a lot of help would be valuable. | |
| I think for the Kiev government, It's a very weird perspective that, you know, in case of a strategic drama in your country, you will survive longer because then, of course, the European Union would support a lot with money, of course, with financial help, but as well with military hardware. | |
| I don't think that the American army would come and help the Ukrainians, but when we look at Ukraine, we should see the country... | |
| Not as an ally of the West, but we should see it maybe more or less like a giant geopolitical mousetrap for the Russians. | |
| They want to step the Russians into that mousetrap, then they arm, they mobilize the Ukrainian army, the paramilitary units, and they would of course involve the Russian army in a lot of fights on Ukrainian territory without the direct involvement of the United States. | |
| I'm convinced that even in that case... | |
| There would be an American politician like John Kerry who would offer himself to negotiate between both sides and so on. | |
| So, in a way, we see the same in Palestine right now, in Gaza, where the country which is supporting very strong one of the war parties, namely Israel, offers itself as a negotiator, as a neutral. | |
| We should see it from that perspective to weaken down Russia, to get Russia involved in a maybe really ugly war which would take place there, maybe in a sort of partisan war with a lot of cruelty, with a lot of casualties, of course with a lot of civilian casualties. | |
| I think what is worrying right now for the neocon faction in the West is when they see the rise of Russia, the quick rise of Russia with Vladimir Putin, when they think back how great was... | |
| Russia, how great was it to see Russia when Boris Yeltsin was the president of that country? | |
| How weak was it? | |
| It was almost a neocon colony in that time. | |
| And when we look at Russia now, it completely, it somehow reborn. | |
| And in a very quick time, we speak about a time of 10, 15 years when this country managed to reorganize itself and to be all of a sudden a global player again. | |
| With a Ukrainian battlefield, of course, Russia would be so much busy. | |
| And, of course, it would have inner political consequences as well. | |
| They would have a peace faction. | |
| There would be liberals in the Kremlin who would argue against that war. | |
| You would have the Falcons as well who would say, yes, we have to attack directly now the West. | |
| So you could bring a lot of trouble. | |
| So I think Ukraine is a sort of that mousetrap. | |
| And in particular, the Kiev government knows very well they are bankrupt. | |
| They don't have a lot of future right now. | |
| I mean, it sounds cynical and discynical when you know that a war might keep you longer alive. | |
| And this is, at least for the Kiev government, it's a very valuable situation right now. | |
| Yes, I think that's a very sound analysis. | |
| And it is interesting to compare this to the war on terror of, say, 10 or 12 years ago, when the enemy was living in a cave or issuing... | |
| VHS, odd VHS videos declaring the end of the West or something like that. | |
| In terms of this Cold War Washington wants to generate with Russia, they're dealing with people who are much more competent and who are really able to engage in an information war. | |
| Thinking back to this recent press conference by the Russian military, they were actually issuing a lot of value. | |
| information. | |
| First off, about the actual BUK devices that they have some Through their surveillance, they've discovered these BUK devices of the Ukrainian military, and that these were actually being stepped up. | |
| I think there were nine present during July 17th. | |
| So, again, this is information that really changes your view of the master narrative put forth by the Western media. | |
| We should be very cautious in talking about this because we're talking about possibilities and probabilities. | |
| We're not talking about certainties. | |
| As I just mentioned, there were these BUK devices used by the Ukrainian military in position to knock down a plane. | |
| There was also the issue of the plane going off course rather dramatically, that all civilian airlines are avoiding this war area, as they should, but this plane was diverting. | |
| to the north and you know it's it's question whether we if we have the so called black box in this plane whether there there might be actually flight information from from Kiev ordering it into the war zone There's also this interesting person, and I would say that we should deal with a lot of caution with this matter, but a so-called Carlos, who was in, I believe, the Kiev air traffic control, and he was actually tweeting... | |
| And I'll definitely put a link to this in the show notes, and I would reiterate again that we should deal with this information cautiously. | |
| But he was tweeting a lot of things that really shake up the narrative, and that was that there were Ukrainian fighters near this plane, that they were escorting it away. | |
| What do you think? | |
| I know that no one has a definitive answer to this, but maybe you could just talk about what might have happened on that day. | |
| Oh, well, at least I think this is a storybook for a lot of movies and for a lot of different... | |
| I heard also about those air traffic theories. | |
| Why was the plane flying above eastern Ukraine? | |
| Why wasn't it flying on its original course 500 kilometers more in the south? | |
| What would have been, I think, Crimea? | |
| But at the same time, we get on the other side a lot of explanations that there is until today. | |
| It's not clear who is controlling the airspace above the... | |
| It's not the Russians, but it's the Ukrainians. | |
| There are many, many different theories, and I'm also very careful. | |
| I know also, I'm convinced you heard about that theory that Vladimir Putin's plane was flying in almost the same airspace at this day, and that the Ukrainian side might have wanted to shoot down his airplane. | |
| But, you know, As you said, we have to be very careful, and we have there a lot of highly hypothetic narratives about that thing. | |
| It is not very easy to deal with all these things, but I think we should always get back on the ground, and the thing on the ground is that we have right now almost 300 casualties, 300 victims of this crash, | |
| and we should see how we deal with I see that we have the eastern side, the Russian side, which is very calm, which says we have to investigate, and we have to investigate all the details, and I'm convinced if every detail will be investigated as... | |
| And as the Russian side right now proposes to do so, we will get answers to all these open questions we were right now mentioning. | |
| So this is the first part of all this. | |
| On the second part, we have the West. | |
| And when we look exactly how the West right now reacts and how the West deals with those 300, almost 300 dead people, we can say, obviously, these people... | |
| Right now between being victims first class and victims second class. | |
| I think you know what I mean. | |
| They will be victims first class if they can convince the Western politics and the Western societies that Russia downed that plane. | |
| Then these people are victims first class. | |
| But if ever will come out that the Ukrainian side... | |
| And there will be the evidence that the Ukrainian side was shooting that plane down. | |
| These poor people will be victims second class. | |
| I don't know if you were reading a lot of social media and especially also on Twitter within the last days since the plane was downed. | |
| You don't read a lot from Western side. | |
| How shall I say? | |
| The people don't really participate in... | |
| They are not really sad about what happened. | |
| They are more to blame now, somebody. | |
| While the Russian side was expressing the sadness and the mourning, you find from the Western side very much now it's all about to blame somebody and you find cynical comments. | |
| So the victims are, to say it like this, the human life of these victims is as valuable as... | |
| The side which can be blamed for their death. | |
| And I think that's the big danger of those investigations right now, that there will be never a real investigation because they want to have those victims as victims first class. | |
| And victims first class are the victims of Vladimir Putin. | |
| The victims of Petrov Poroshenko would just be victims second class. | |
| And by the way, this is also nothing new. | |
| We know this also from the Syrian battleground. | |
| Christians who are killed and crucified by the Sunni extremist fighters of the Islamic State are victims second class. | |
| And those who were killed during the war by the Syrian army are the victims first class. | |
| The journalist who is kidnapped... | |
| We don't know his name. | |
| The journalist who is arrested by the Syrian army, he will have a big campaign for his life. | |
| So we have everywhere this first and second class and this doesn't help at all in any investigation. | |
| And this is right now the big danger. | |
| When we speak about those possibilities and theories, what it's about, it depends now all who is to blame. | |
| Yes, I think that was very articulate. | |
| Some victims are more important than others, and those are the ones that can fit into a geopolitical plan. | |
| And I think that's an excellent way of putting it of first and second class victims. | |
| Before we put a bookmark in this conversation, I just want to return quickly to something we were talking about earlier. | |
| And that is this notion that the Kiev government is at a breaking point, as it were, in terms of being bankrupt. | |
| Do you think that they're going to hit the wall at some point in this upcoming year in terms of not being able to provide services, not being able to provide... | |
| pensions and so forth and that we might actually we might reach some kind of climax this situation where where either the West really you know goes all in with Ukraine I mean maybe not a military intervention but but determines that it is going to prop up this government or not Do you think we're going to reach a breaking point in the next, say, three to six months? | |
| I think we have this breaking point already behind us because when we look at Ukraine today, the country we see on our maps doesn't exist anymore. | |
| So we have a divided country. | |
| We have a country where in the east is a war zone where... | |
| An army is doing a war against its own civilian population. | |
| And we have on the Western side where the Maidan government is and where also the people are who are supporting this, we have already a sort of Western or European Union protectorate. | |
| This country couldn't exist already without the help of the West. | |
| And this is a very weird situation because this country is ruled by billionaires, by very rich people. | |
| That's just democracy. | |
| Well, you know, it's freedom. | |
| Exactly. | |
| But of course, in Western Ukraine, it's more dramatic than I think in any other European country right now. | |
| So this is already a protectorate. | |
| And the leaders of Kiev know very well that they are, in terms of geopolitics, very important for the West and that the West wouldn't... | |
| Let them fall apart. | |
| And the West gives also that signals that they won't do that. | |
| But it's most likely that Western Ukraine will become a sort of bigger Kosovo or maybe a sort of Bosnia, where... | |
| I mean, these countries are as well. | |
| They are governed by criminal gangs who call themselves now political parties or political organizations or NGOs. | |
| And the security and all the economical order is all organized by the European Union or by NATO as well. | |
| So I think this will be The long-term development of at least Western Ukraine. | |
| We don't know what will happen with Eastern Ukraine. | |
| A lot of it depends on what will there happen within the next weeks or months. | |
| But, well, to be a little bit, how shall I say, Right now it looks like those independent fighters in the eastern Ukraine get a lot of pressure by the Ukrainian army. | |
| So it doesn't look like that within the next couple of weeks the army would leave eastern Ukraine and in eastern Ukraine would be established a new state called New Russia. | |
| or whatever. | |
| So it will take a while and the war is always very expensive and the Kiev government knows they can rely on the West, that the West will help them financing that war. | |
| And by financing a war they know the West would also finance the We had already, by the way, in Ukraine, those... | |
| You were mentioning that pensions were not paid or they were paid much too late. | |
| I was speaking when I was in Crimea during the referendum to some people, to Ukrainians, who were voting for Russia in the referendum. | |
| And they told me they are not the big fans of Russia, but they know that their relatives in Lemberg, in Lviv, or in the Kiev countryside, that they had problems with the social services, for example. | |
| The Maidan push, which after that happened. | |
| So I think there is already right now that situation. | |
| And that state can only exist by the support, and support means always a little bit by the control by the West. | |
| But I think people like Petro Poroshenko or Igor Kolomoisky... | |
| They are not very much interested who is now really having control as long as these people can go into their business and can proceed in their business. | |
| I think that's the important thing. | |
| So we have maybe sooner or later there a sort of high-level mafia or gangster state as we see it, for example, exactly in Kosovo. | |
| I think this is an analogy which works out. | |
| Well, I think the president, who was formerly known as the Chocolate King, probably is a kind of functionary type. | |
| He strikes me as a very boring, yet probably competent businessman who wants to just sell chocolate to everyone. | |
| So he might actually even want to have a kind of detente with Russia. | |
| I don't see him as ideological. | |
| I might certainly be wrong about that. | |
| But at the same time... | |
| If we have a standoff that lasts for months, maybe even years, what we might see is a kind of slow genocide of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. | |
| This was actually called for by someone who is much more ideological, and that is the... | |
| I mean, where Russia, because Putin is a realist, he's a very... | |
| Cool and cautious operator that he might understand that Ukraine is a bit of a trap and he might not want to go in. | |
| He might not want to put boots on the ground, as they say. | |
| And what we have is a kind of long-term Mexican standoff and the people underneath suffer terribly and there might really be a genocide or a kind of ethnic cleansing of Russian speakers from eastern Ukraine. | |
| Right. | |
| Like a business. | |
| Like a manager. | |
| Who is installed for running that country. | |
| But also, Peter Poroshenko and also the administration in Kiev might have learned one lesson within the last decades. | |
| And the lesson is, you can commit genocide if you commit it in a slow way. | |
| If you post a genocide very quick, you will be stopped and you will have a lot of protests. | |
| But if you do your genocide slow enough, nobody will be interested. | |
| It's like the theory of the frog in the cold water. | |
| When you throw a frog into the hot water, he jumps out. | |
| But if you put the frog in the cold water and warm it slowly up, the frog will sit in the boiling water without jumping out. | |
| And I think this is exactly an analogy which shows how we deal with genocide. | |
| And when we look, for example, again to Kosovo, It's happening a genocide since now almost 15 years, and nobody is talking about that, that the complete extermination of the Serbian presence, and when I say the Serbian presence, I mean the physical Serbian presence. | |
| Of course, the Serbs are not killed there. | |
| They have to leave. | |
| The extermination goes so far that the Albanians or the radical Albanians even destroy the Serbian graveyards. | |
| They destroy them, they disgrace them, they put animal bones when they were having a festival or so and they were eating their beef. | |
| They are putting the bones, the remainings of the animals on the graveyards of the Serbs and they are destroying those graveyards. | |
| So we see an absolute, slowly but an absolute clean I think this is also what the people in Kiev know. | |
| They will get rid of the Russians but it might take 15 or 20 years if nobody is now interfering or intervening. | |
| In Eastern Ukraine might leave then to Russia or to any other country, like we see it also in Serbia. | |
| They are not just going back to Serbia, but a lot of them are living in Germany or even in the U.S. or somewhere in Europe, and then migrants. | |
| So this is also a type of genocide, but a slowly one, and it's a very, what shall I say, it's a genocide which will work out 100%. | |
| And if it goes on in Kosovo like that, maybe in 20 years. | |
| You will not even anymore notice that in some areas where Serbian settlements, because they are exterminated, they disappeared. | |
| Where you had a Serbian graveyard, there will be the big parking spot of the new supermarket. | |
| So this is really absolute and it's unconditional. | |
| And I think maybe the analysts in Kiev know that. | |
| And if there is right now nothing happening, I think this is, and if there is not any stronger support coming from Russia, this is what the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine might face too, that type of fate. | |
| Yes, well, this has been rather saddening, but sometimes reality is rather saddening. | |
| Manuel, thank you again for being on the program. | |
| I think maybe I should have you back and we talk about something that is actually fun because this is a very tragic situation and obviously a much more complex one than it's been. | |
| depicted in the Western media. | |
| But thank you again, and I hope to have you on. | |
| Oh, thank God. | |
| Okay, thank you so much. | |
| Thank you. |