Alien Space Bats wrote:OMGeverynameistaken wrote:Again, what's the motivation?
Putin is an amoral political bastard. Yes. He has demonstrated an exceptional capacity for being a jerk. What he has not shown is a tendency towards stupidity. Why, just when everybody was starting to forget about the whole Ukraine thing, would he choose to draw everybody's attention back to it in the most spectacularly awful way possible? What, exactly, is the benefit to Putin and Russia?
Are we speaking hypothetically here?
Strictly speaking, if we are, then it would be this: To send a signal to the West to knock it off with the sanctions and let Russia do whatever the Hell it please within its "sphere of influence", lest Westerners get killed in "accidents" like this. The underlying assumption, of course, is that the West doesn't have the balls to respond in any way other than further sanctions, which would in turn be met with more "accidents". In time, the West, unwilling to escalate (or continue paying a price in blood to maintain their anti-Russian sanctions), would back off.
Or so the theory goes.
Again, this is strictly a hypothetical response to a hypothetical question — nothing more.
ADDENDUM: Bonus points here for the separatists refusing to allow anybody but Russian investigators to the crash scene, with Russian investigators then hauling off all the debris to someplace in Russia, conducting their own investigation, and then announcing to the world that the Malaysian 777 blew up in mid-air spontaneously, and that the Boeing Corporation's flagship product is unsafe, with a call for customers to demand a recall and refund that would bankrupt America's foremost commercial aircraft vendor.
See, I can come up with all kinds of interesting conspiracy theories, too. All one needs for that sort of thing is a complete isolation from any relevant facts.
I don't think that Putin is even hypothetically dumb enough to think that causing a multinational incident in a way that will INSTANTLY (as has been demonstrated here) be blamed on Russia until it is absolutely proven otherwise will be a good way to get 'the west' to back off. Again, Putin is many things, but I hope we can agree he's not mentally disabled.
