Alexander Clackson, Global Research
Almost immediately after the news began to spread that a Malaysian Airlines plane was apparently shot down over Ukraine, Western media and politicians blamed Russia for the event, claiming that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be directly responsible, despite complete lack of concrete evidence about who is to blame. This event is being used by the United States and its Western allies to further isolate Russia, after they failed to achieve this objective by provoking Russia in Ukraine.
Unjustified blame on Russia
While Putin took the right approach by stating that the plane crash in eastern Ukraine must be investigated thoroughly and objectively, Western politicians used the disaster for their own political agenda of isolating Russia. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has stated that the crisis should “wake Europe up to the threat posed by Putin”. In fact, this event is very beneficial to the United States, who have been unsuccessfully trying to persuade its European allies to slap heavy sanctions on Russia. NATO and the US have been provoking Russia to intervene in Ukraine by allowing Western-backed Ukrainian President Poroshenko to kill ethnic Russian civilians in Ukraine and even shelling Russian territory, killing a Russian national. Putin rightly did not fall for these provocations. The United States, therefore, wasted no time in using this plane crash for their own political gains, pressuring Europe to escalate sanctions against Moscow. Clinton has already called for the EU to increase sanctions on Russia, while the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on Russia to explain the disaster as it “now seems certain it’s been brought down by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile”, despite complete lack of strong evidence for such a claim.
