MH17: World See Tragedy, US Sees “Game Changer”

Tony Cartalucci ■ NATO needed a “game changer,” because it was playing a game it was clearly losing. The dubious circumstances surrounding the downing of MH17 – occurring just as Kiev’s forces were deteriorating across the country and additional US sanctions against Russia fell flat – is more than a mere coincidence. RUSI and the Atlantic Council’s statement represent an increasingly desperate and shrinking corner the West finds itself in. With the ascension of Russia along with other BRICS nations, a “game changer” was desperately needed to “stain Russia’s relations with the world for years to come,” and help arrest what appeared to be the irreversible rise of the global East and South, in tandem with the irreversible decline of the West.

Finian Cunningham ■ US Aims at Blowing EU-Russia Rift with Downed Airliner || The downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over eastern Ukraine with the loss of all 298 onboard comes amid mounting frustration between Washington and its European allies over the imposition of further trade sanctions on Russia. Days before the doomed flight, American officials were quietly voicing their agitation at European leaders’ reluctance to apply sanctions that would hit Russia’s key economic sectors. While media reports earlier this week suggested that the US and the European Union were adopting a «united front» in the ramping up of penalties on Moscow, the underlying reality was very different. EU leaders were actually telling media that they were not yet ready to go beyond existing sanctions against Russian individuals, by following Washington’s latest measures against Russia’s energy, banking and defence sectors.

Jason Ditz ■ Much Hysteria on Downed Plane, Little Evidence || The big problem is that the plane crashed in a warzone, and evidence isn’t readily obtainable so far, though the Ukrainian rebels active in the area insist that they have already allowed OSCE and Ukrainian investigators onto the site to investigate, and would allow other international groups access to the site. [...] Right now, everyone is denying responsibility for the shoot-down, and the desperate array of dubious evidence pointing in a million different directions makes it impossible to know the truth. That investigators from Ukraine et al. seem focused primarily in shifting the blame to a politically convenient target only adds to the difficulty of getting an honest assessment of the incident.