A Russian arms manufacturer treated journalists to a
Kafkaesque press conference ahead of the release of the Dutch Safety Board’s official
MH17 report on Oct. 13 – even offering footage of an experiment in which they
blew up a plane to prove that Russia did not blow up the plane that plummeted from the sky over eastern Ukraine on July 17,
2014.
But weapons experts were skeptical of the “experiment”
offered by the arms manufacturer, Almaz Antey, which produces BUK missiles, and speakers at the press
conference failed to offer definitive proof of their claims.
“It’s all (nonsense),” said independent Russian
military expert Pavel Felgenhauer. “It’s a C-grade way of resolving something.
You know what results you have to get, and then you manipulate accordingly,” he
said.
The claims offered up by Almaz-Antey head Ian Novikov
don’t “make any sense whatsoever. It doesn’t prove anything. And what they
wanted to prove – that the plane was shot down by Ukraine – they can never
prove,” he said.
“It’s like the Russians denying the Katyn massacre and
inventing different things” to refute that the event ever happened, he said.
To back up their argument that
MH17 was shot down from Ukrainian-controlled territory, and not from land
controlled by pro-Russian separatists, the company conducted an experiment that
saw them blow up the nose of an Il-86 jet to simulate the downing of MH17 and
replicate the blast pattern of the crash.
A video of the explosion was
played for the audience from various angles to show that the destruction and
the debris that resulted differed greatly from that left over after the MH17
crash.
But many questioned how the
experiment could have brought accurate results if the conditions of the
simulation failed to match those of the original catastrophe.
Kirill Mikhailov, an
independent open-source researcher from the War in Ukraine team, had only
sarcasm in reaction to the experiment.
“Almaz-Antey blew up a non-moving warhead on the ground to simulate a
rapidly moving rocket’s hit on MH17. Seems legit,” Mikhailov wrote on Twitter.
Apart from the video, the company had another secret weapon up its
sleeve: a 7th-grade geometry textbook, which was repeatedly cited to
refute the international community’s theory that MH17 was shot down by a BUK
near Snizhne.
A corresponding graphic of the textbook was projected
onto a screen to drive this home to the audience.
Bu foreign journalists were quick to call out the company’s
contradictions at the press conference.
Novikov initially said the
company’s investigation proved the plane was shot down not from
rebel-controlled Snizhne, as maintained by international investigators, but by
Ukrainian-controlled Zarozhenskoye.
But after a Wall Street
Journalist challenged Novikov’s assertion that this area was
Ukrainian-controlled at the time of the tragedy, Novikov quickly backtracked,
admitting that he had no idea who held the town at that time.
The presentation also saw them backtrack on earlier
claims, namely that the missile used was an M938M1. After pinpointing that type
of missile as the one used at a press conference earlier this year, on Oct. 13,
Novikov, quietly shifted to a M938 – a missile no longer in use by Russia.
Nick de Larrinaga, an editor at IHS Jane’s Defence
Weekly, an authoritative weapons and defense publication, took to Twitter to
call Novikov’s bluff on this claim.
“Almaz-Antey’s
claims of 9M38 is not consistent with the warhead fragments taken from the MH17 crash
site by RTL4 and analysed by IHS Jane’s,” de Larrinaga wrote.
As for why the company decided to hold their press
conference on the very same day the Dutch Safety Board was due to release its
report, Novikov said this was merely a coincidence, that it “just happened this
way.”
The event ended on an awkward note. Novikov offered
concluding remarks that “you cannot refute an experiment,” though “you can
refute arguments and logic.”
A Russian journalist quickly raised his hand to note
that it is actually possible to refute an experiment, asking if Almaz Antey
planned to fund an independent scientific assessment of their research.
“No, we’re not,” he said, expressing confidence in the
company’s findings.
The company felt the need to present their conclusions,
he said, because “we can’t let anyone tell us we don’t know geometry.”
Staff
writer Allison Quinn can be reached at [email protected]
