The Tu-154 disaster: the concert has been cancelled

The Russian Tu-154 which crashed over the Black Sea was in good repair. This was stated by chief of the flight safety department of the Russian Armed Forces Sergei Baynetov, the BBC Russian Service reports. He also said that the plane’s captain Major Roman Volkov was a first class pilot and the crew repeatedly performed flights to Syria. Such statements effectively contradict claims the disaster happened due to poor technical condition or a piloting error. On the other hand, the terror attack line of enquiry is being rejected or at least not prioritized. “At the moment, there is no data pointing to a terror attack, and security services and investigators do not consider this line of enquiry to be a priority,” RIA Novosti wrote citing a source in the Russian security services.

“They are trying to calm us by saying it did not happen due to a terror attack, but rather due to a piloting error or technical fault. However, people stress that the debris are scattered over the area of a square kilometer and a half. It is a lot, and could be an indication that the plane started to disintegrate mid-air. That is, it was not destroyed in the fall. If it happened mid-air, it means it was an attack, because it is impossible to have a plane disintegrating mid-air because of a piloting error. If a technical fault is to blame, it is all the same, since there are no faults that lead to a mid-air disintegration,” Russian aviation expert Vadim Lukashevich believes (openrussia.org).

Let us recall that the Russian Defense Ministry plane disappeared from radar on December 25 at 5:40 a.m. Moscow time shortly after departing from Sochi. People onboard included soldiers, media workers, including three employees each of Channel One Russia, NTV, and Zvezda Channel, and artists of the Alexandrov Ensemble. Apart from them, executive director of the Just Aid Foundation Elizaveta Glinka, better known as Dr. Lisa, was also present (she had denied the presence of Russian troops in the Donbas). Overall, 84 passengers and 8 crew members have died. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Tu-154 wreckage has been found 1.5 km from the coast in the vicinity of Sochi at a depth of 50 to 70 meters.

“Of course, the FSB will investigate all the lines of enquiry, including a terror attack, but they will not report on it,” Yevhen Marchuk posted on Facebook. “The criminal case launched by the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has nothing to do with terrorism either. Coming so soon after the murder of the Russian ambassador in Turkey, an attack would be a very ominous sign for Russia in connection with its participation in the Syrian Civil War. Russian experts will relatively quickly learn the true cause of the disaster, but the full investigation will not be completed soon. A government commission is usually appointed to investigate the physical causes of the disaster, while the Investigative Committee, relying on the commission’s evidence, establishes both the causes and the guilty parties and sends the case to the court. The complete official information on the real causes of this disaster will not appear soon.”

A separate matter is the Ukrainians’ reaction to the event. It must be noted at once that the Russian plane was heading to Syria with New Year greetings for the Russian Aerospace Forces’ units stationed at the Khmeimim Air Base. For example, the abovementioned Russian Alexandrov Ensemble performed the song “Polite People” in 2014, celebrating the occupation of Crimea. That is, the people who were onboard the plane, including the soldiers, journalists, and artists, can all be considered as part of the “support group” used in the implementation of Russian aggression and Russian policy in general.

“I have as much compassion for the Russians who died in a plane en route to Syria as I have for the Russian soldiers who died in Syria. They served the same cause,” philosopher Oleksii Panych posted on Facebook. “Yes, any person’s death is tragic. But there is a moral difference between the death of the murderer, the death of the victim, the death of the victim’s defender, and the death of the murderer’s accomplice. And with all due respect to Dr. Lisa’s activities in Russia, I will remember her as Dr. Lisa ‘There Are No Russian Soldiers in Ukraine…’ She saved lives working under contract with the devil, who, hiding behind people like her, took away far more lives than she managed to save in the same time.”

“A country suffering from military aggression is cruel to the aggressor,” blogger Denys Kazansky posted. “Well, how am I to explain this to you? Watch 2014 videos, read the news. For instance, one about Volodymyr Rybak, who was detained by ‘polite people’ from Crimea (ones glorified by the Alexandrov Ensemble), had his stomach cut open and was thrown into the river to die. About the Ukrainian plane which carried paratroopers and was shot down near Luhansk. About the Boeing airliner shot down near Torez. About the soldiers who were burnt alive near Zelenopillia by Grad launchers that fired from the Russian soil. About all the people shot when they walked through the ‘green corridor’ in Ilovaisk. About the dead Aidar Battalion soldiers from Metalist, whose mutilated corpses were filmed and shown on Lifenews. It is not right to rejoice at someone else’s death. The sole exception to this rule applies to the death of one’s torturer. Russians are killing Ukrainians in Ukraine. Yes, we are tired of hate. Get out of our territory. Give us a break from hating you.”