Oddly Familiar

Gen. Anatoly Kornukov, who gained command of the Russian Air Force in 1998, with President Vladimir V. Putin in 2001.  

Credit Pool photo by Itar-Tas

In command of air defences on Sakhalin Island off the Siberian coast in 1983, General Kornukov commanded the pilot of a Soviet fighter jet to shoot down a commercial Korean 747 passenger liner bound for Seoul, South Korea from New York, on September 1, 1983. The airliner had accidently gone off course and briefly flew into Soviet airspace near Sakhalin. Believing it to be a U.S. spy plane, the pilot hit Flight 007 with two air-to-air missiles just seconds before it would have re-entered international airspace.

Born in Ukraine in 1942, General Kornukov was a career military man, serving as a fighter pilot in Russia's air defence forces. When that KAL 007 jet went down 269 passengers and crew were killed, their bodies never recovered. General Kornukov steadily rose in the ranks of the Russian military. He had boasted his actions demonstrated his fortitude, his capacity to make tough decisions, "to take responsibility". And he said, in a later interview, that he would do the very same thing again.

In a 1998 interview on Russian television, at that time elevated by then-president Boris Yeltsin to become the new chief of the Russian Air Force, General Kornukov admitted: "The recollections bring back some unpleasant feelings. Those events left scars and added some gray hairs to my head." On the other hand, "I will always be convinced that I gave the right order. Sometimes, in strategic operations, we had to sacrifice battalions to save the army."

And now there is Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 where 298 people from a multitude of countries met their instantly dreadful deaths, shot down by a Russian-supplied missile (surface-to-air-missile: SAM) by ethnic-Russian separatists from their base within Ukraine close to the Russian border. When the 1983 event occurred, then-President Reagan launched an all-out war of accusation at the Soviet Union, while the Soviets did everything in their bag of tricks to cover up their responsibility.

Not all that much has changed from then to now, it would seem. Russia still manipulating world affairs creating chaos, disruption, hostility, suspicion and conflict. One thing has changed, though, and that is, clearly enough, the manner in which America itself stands up to its own responsibilities as the world's superpower and allegedly moral guide. Where once President Reagan unequivocally referred to the "Korean airline massacre", naming it a crime against humanity, an "act of barbarism", President Obama is carefully cautionary.

Even while American intelligence is working alongside Ukraine in authenticating the validity of the intercepted communications between separatist ethnic Russians and a Russian intelligence operative respecting the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner with the loss of 298 lives, there have been no unequivocal statements of denunciation of the Russians tied directly to the atrocity. Instead caution prevails emanating from the White House.

Back then, it was Yuri Andropov, once head of Soviet intelligence who was President of the USSR. Now, it is another old KGB operative who heads the Russian Federation, in the person of Vladimir Putin, a man, like the communist elite of the old Soviet Union, who has a penchant for amassing for his personal pleasure, great wealth denied the ordinary citizens of Russia, many of whom live in dire, hopeless want; their drunken-stupored poverty, his reputed $40-billion personal wealth.

An armed pro-Russian separatist stands guard as monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and members of a Malaysian air crash investigations team inspect the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo), Donetsk region July 22, 2014. Almost 300 people were killed when the Malaysian airliner went down last Thursday. (REUTERS/Maxim Zmeyev)

Where so many years ago the Kremlin claimed that a U.S. spy plane was present behind the MH 17 before it was shot down a similar 'rumour' has now surfaced. Current conspiracy theorists who go out of their way to explain the seemingly inexplicable by raising scenarios that fit right in with their self-exonerating ideas of sanctimonious righteousness in actions taken, claim that it was really Vladimir Putin's plane traversing the same air route that the Ukrainian air force had targeted, hitting the Malaysian plane instead.