Dutch Report Concludes MH17 Shot Down by Missile; MH17:  The Open Source Evidence
FRED PLEITGEN, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: MH17 was brought down by a Russian-made missile but who fired it? Ukraine's foreign minister responds to the Dutch safety board's report.</s>PAVLO KLIMKIN, UKRAINIAN FOREIGN MINISTER: . for us, it's critical to have a legally compulsory option for Russia to get those responsible for this tragedy to this tribunal or to any legal vehicle. It's indeed critical.</s>PLEITGEN (voice-over): Plus I speak with a blogger who says he's located the missile's launch site. And "Henry Kissinger: The Idealist"? That's what Niall Ferguson says.</s>NIALL FERGUSON, HISTORIAN AND AUTHOR: . he wasn't the American Machiavelli or Bismarck. That's what I'd been led to expect by previous books.</s>PLEITGEN: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Fred Pleitgen, in for Christiane this week. And it was another heart-breaking day for the families of those killed on board flight MH17 as Dutch investigators laid out all the details they have uncovered about the incident. It's clear the 777 was shot down by a Russian made surface-to-air missile but they don't know who launched it, pro-Russian separatists or Ukrainian forces. A separate criminal investigation will attempt to find the culprits and the Netherlands' prime minister urged Russia's full participation.</s>MARK RUTTE, DUTCH PRIME MINISTER (through translator): I want to call on Russian authorities to respect but also to provide complete cooperation with this report and the following criminal investigation by the Dutch public prosecutor in collaboration with four other countries.</s>PLEITGEN: Now, Moscow immediately lashed out at the report, calling it, quote, "biased and political." The maker of Buk missiles, a state- owned company, said the model used in the attack was too old to belong to Russia. The Dutch report says the airspace above the conflict zone should have been closed to civilian airplanes at the time the plane was shot down. And for an official Ukrainian response I spoke with the country's foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, who joined me exclusively from the United Nations in New York.</s>PLEITGEN: Pavlo Klimkin, welcome to the program.</s>KLIMKIN: It's a pleasure to be with you.</s>PLEITGEN: Sir, as you know, the report came out today by the Dutch safety board and it gave a lot of new facts but it did not assign blame for who shot down MH17. How satisfied are you with the report? And what do you make of the findings?</s>KLIMKIN: Firstly, it's a technical investigation, the report. And it's about the reason why and in what way the Malaysian airplane has been shot down. We will have, in the future, the criminal investigation report, hopefully, at the beginning of next year. And we will definitely get more about the chain of command.</s>PLEITGEN: Now right before the press conference happens today where the report was issued, the Russian maker of the Buk missile system came out and issued their own report, where they said that the missile must have been fired from territory controlled by Ukrainian forces. I want us to listen in to something that was said at that press conference.</s>YAN NOVIKOV, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, RUSSIAN  STATE ARMS PRODUCER (through translator): The results of the experiment have entirely refuted the conclusions by the Dutch commission about the type of the rocket and the place of the launch. Today we can say definitely -- and we will show it in our presentation -- that in case the Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines had been hit by a Buk missile complex that would mean that it had been hit by an 9M38 missile launched from the village of Zaroshchenske.</s>PLEITGEN: How do you respond to that, sir?</s>KLIMKIN: You know, my response is very straightforward and clear. Firstly, we had a unique investigation team. We've been given the lead for the esteem -- for our Dutch esteemed friends and partners. It's about combined experience. It's about our key experts. And no doubt that is a missile has been fired from the territory controlled by Russia and by pro- Russian proxies. So in this sense, Russia can play any kind of game with any kind of quasi- --</s>KLIMKIN: -- evidences. But in any way, we have clear technical investigation reports.</s>PLEITGEN: One of the other things that was criticized in the report was that, prior to this happening, the airspace over the conflict zone was not completely closed off. Why didn't you do that?</s>KLIMKIN: The answer is also really straightforward. No one, literally no one could have imagined that such highly sophisticated and extremely dangerous weapons could be brought into Donbas. And it was brought by Russia.</s>PLEITGEN: But, sir, I just want to stick with that point because, three days prior to the shootdown of MH17, on July 14th, 2014, an Antonov 26 of the Ukrainian Air Force was shot down at a height of 6,500 meters, which is about 22,000 feet. So it must have been clear at that point that there was long-range, high-altitude anti-aircraft weaponry in that area, wouldn't it?</s>KLIMKIN: Our authorities, including the militaries, believe that Antonov airplane has been hit by Russian missiles and from the Russian territory. And it was about different altitude. And from the technical point of view, it's completely different from shotting (sic) down the airplane at the altitude more than 11,000 meters. So in any kind of risk analysis and in any kind of imagination, there was no, in any way, understanding about Russia bringing such extremely dangerous anti-air missile complex to Ukraine.</s>PLEITGEN: When we look at the investigation that's going forward, obviously a lot of things are still very murky; a lot of facts aren't readily accessible. Do you think that an international tribunal would be the best way forward to try and bring clarity rather than a criminal investigation that's going on right now or technical reports that are done by countries, an international investigation into all this?</s>KLIMKIN: Look, I believe it could go along in a complementary way. We need criminal investigation reports for understanding who were behind this tragedy. And I believe that international tribunal is the best legal vehicle to address this issue because it's fully accountable to the Security Council. It's fully unbiased and it's fully transparent. Why should you reject the whole notion of searching a national tribunal if you want the perpetrators to be brought to justice? If we can't go along with such an option, we could come forward with the idea either of so-called hybrid tribunal or national jurisdiction. But we could also try to find an option where, after legal shaping up for the future option, we could ask for the Security Council back in because, for us, it's critical to have a legally compulsory option for Russia to get those responsible for this tragedy to this tribunal or to any legal vehicle. It's indeed critical.</s>PLEITGEN: Pavlo Klimkin, thank you for joining the program.</s>KLIMKIN: It was a pleasure.</s>PLEITGEN: And as we can see, still a lot of controversy, a lot of open questions. Eliot Higgins, also known as Brown Moses, is a British blogger who spent countless hours verifying and geolocating crowd-sourced photos and videos to try to provide evidence of the launch site of the missile that brought down MH17 as well as the big question of who fired it. He founded the Bellingcat Blog and is a visiting research associate at the Kings College, right here in London and he joins me tonight. Well, Eliot, thank you for joining the program. During the presentation today about the findings of the commission, they gave the area from where the missile may have been launched at around 320 square kilometers. You say you know exactly where it was launched from. How and why?</s>ELIOT HIGGINS, BELLINGCAT.COM: That's right. We've examined what we</s>PLEITGEN: So you're talking about Twitter feeds, blogs, things people have said publicly on the Internet?</s>HIGGINS: Yes, and things like satellite map imagery and other information. What we have here, for example, is a tweet that was sent out a few hours after MH17 was shot down. This shows smoke rising from the ground and this was said to be the Buk missile --</s>PLEITGEN: The trajectory of the missile.</s>HIGGINS: Yes, so you can see where the missile came from. So what we did, we looked at all this visual information here and we compared it to satellite map imagery and what that gave us was the actual direction of the smoke. In this --</s>PLEITGEN: This is the field where it allegedly was shot from?</s>HIGGINS: -- it's around this area, we believe, because this field is very interesting because this has been plowed. We can see in the satellite imagery just after July 17th that this was plowed. Journalists went out to this location, they found various people pointing in this direction as the area the missile was launched from. If we in fact look at imagery from July 16th, obviously, we can actually see that it wasn't plowed at that time. This is satellite imagery of the field. So we have farmers saying in the local area the field was on fire on July 17th. What's also very interesting, if you look at the social media posts in the area around moments after MH17 was shot down, you see people saying, I saw a missile, I saw a rocket, it came from this direction. And every time it points in one direction, which is this general location. So you start with the one photograph. What we do is build more information around those images. What we have here is this is marking satellite data that was provided by the U.S. government and this again --</s>PLEITGEN: Open source, again, available to anyone.</s>HIGGINS: Well, this was something they published from a satellite that records various data and signals and it points to this specific -- this location is the approximate launch site. It was a very low resolution image so there's a certain degree of inaccuracy but again it points to this same general location. So time and time again we're able to build up these layers of information that point to this launch site. And as the Dutch safety board showed today, that their calculations and the Russian calculations and the Ukrainian calculations all point to an area that this is part of.</s>PLEITGEN: Now that's the one question. The other question is whose possession was the Buk missile battery in? And you tracked that back as well, didn't you?</s>HIGGINS: That's correct. On the day very shortly after MH17 was shot down, we had images like this, which showed the Buk missile launch, which you can see --</s>PLEITGEN: Right here, yes. Exactly.</s>PLEITGEN: -- tarpaulin or something right here or a net over the --</s>HIGGINS: -- camouflage netting covering the missiles. And we have several images -- it's always shown on this truck, with this white cabin and this blue stripe and this yellow awning, it's the -- you know, loading ramps. But we want to know exactly where these were taken. So what we did with this image, we had the shop, you can see here and we simply Googled the name of the shop and the towns it could be in. And that actually took us to a wiki that was for Eastern Ukrainian streets. And it had a list of streets with the shops that were on them. So we then have the street name and the shop name. So we Googled that. That brought the court document where there had been a fight in the shop which gave the full address. We also found videos of a guy who was driving around, filming the streets, which we actually could use to find the precise location. And once we have that precise location, we could use these shadows to tell the time of day, which gave us about 12:30. Then we found social media posts made around 12:30 of people saying, I've just seen a Buk in this location. And then we have journalists go in, again --</s>PLEITGEN: This area was controlled by Russian separatists at the time?</s>HIGGINS: Yes. We could see this Buk missile launcher, traveling through the area controlled by Russian separatists. But then it got to Snezhnoye and unloaded from the truck and the last images we have of it is it driving south out of the town towards that launch site.</s>PLEITGEN: On its own power.</s>HIGGINS: On its own power.</s>PLEITGEN: Driving on its own power. When you do something like this on the Web, you don't just make friends, you make enemies as well. What sort of reactions have you gotten? Have there been attempts to discredit to what you are doing?</s>HIGGINS: Yes, the -- I mean Russia today has put out something like five different reports on our work, criticizing it, in the last week alone. What's very interesting, one part of the work we've done is looking at the claims of the Russian government, in particular, the Russian ministry of defense. They had a big press conference in July 21st, 2014, and they presented a series of -- their evidence there. We've gone through all the evidence and all of it is either fabrications or lies. And, you know, what happens is we -- we're attacked by Russia today, for example, for the work we're doing but they never actually engage directly with the claims we've made. You don't have to be Columbo to figure out the Russian government, you know, the Russian ministry of defense immediately lies about their evidence and then the Russian media is attacking someone like me and then the Dutch safety board comes out and says their work supports the work we're doing. So obviously we're causing concern with the Russians.</s>PLEITGEN: Eliot Higgins, thanks very much.</s>HIGGINS: Thank you. And if you'd like to see and explore Eliot Higgins' investigative work in-depth you can find it at bellingcat.com. And of course also including this very recent report about where the Buk missile came from and where the rocket was fired. And also just a note to say that we did, of course, also reach out to the Russian government to come on the program tonight but, unfortunately, no one was available to come on. And we are continuing to seek comment. As Ukraine faces some criticism for not closing its airspace before the downing of MH17, the question is also what has the aviation industry learned from the incident? It seems at least they're more aware. Some airlines are avoiding Iraqi and Iranian airspace, fearing Russia's cruise missiles launched from the Caspian Sea to hit targets in Syria as Moscow increases its military involvement there. My next guest --</s>PLEITGEN: -- Niall Ferguson, is highly critical of what of what he thinks is America's passive role in that and other conflicts. He thinks a former diplomat would have done a better job. But was Henry Kissinger really an idealist? Find out after this.