Ukraine's security chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said that Kremlin-backed separatists on July 17 intended to shoot down a Russian passenger plane to give Moscow a pretext for conventionally invading Ukraine.
At an Aug. 7 briefing in Kyiv, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine alleged that Aeroflot Flight 2074, flying to Larnaca in Cyprus from Moscow, was the target, not the Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, where 298 people were killed in the shoot-down from a ground-to-air missile.
He said both passenger jets were flying at similar altitudes and speed, and located in close proximity to each other above Donetsk Oblast during that fateful day. The Malaysian aircraft was flying at an altitude of 10,100 meters and a speed of 909 kilometers per hour and the Russian one at 10,600 meters at a speed of 768 kilometers per hour, he added.
Apparently, separatists also confused the names of two identically named cities, presumably because of their Russian origin. There are two cities named Pervomayske located in Donetsk Oblast and separatists had confused the two, said the nation’s top spy. So instead of transporting the Russian-supplied Buk missile west from Donetsk, they took it in the opposite direction, near the border of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.
If the Kremlin-backed insurgents had struck the Russian aircraft, it could have landed in territory controlled by the Ukrainian military, allowing Russia to blame the Ukrainian government and create a pretext for an overt Russian military invasion of the east.
The Ukrainian intelligence service says that Russian armed forces had been planning to invade Ukraine on July 18. The Russian side had been conducting an informational campaign for such an event for several days before, with Russian news media massively spreading information that the Ukrainian side was shelling the Russian Federation.
Moscow maintains that the Ukrainian military shot down the Malaysian airliner, and denies involvement in the tragedy.
