A whistleblower’s insider knowledge and shocking revelations in “MH-17: In Search of Truth”

Vasily Prozorov, “MH-17: In Search of Truth” (UKR Leaks, December 2019)

Currently gaining a lot of attention on alternative news websites is this minimally made and straightforward documentary by Ukrainian ex-SBU security officer and whistleblower Vasily Prozorov. The documentary plays like an extended news report with one shocking revelation after another about what really happened to the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. Initially the English-language dubbing which has a strong Slavic accent is hard to follow but after some minutes of being accustomed to it, listeners can follow the narrative fairly easily.

The first half of the documentary concentrates on dismantling the lies and disinformation that has built up around the Boeing passenger jet’s shoot-down almost as soon as it hit the ground. Apparent leaked recordings of Donbass rebel fighters rejoicing over the shoot-down came out almost straight away on social media, in itself suspicious as such information, if true, would have been classified information by the SBU straight away and not released for a long time. Considerable attention is paid to demolishing Ukrainian government claims that the Ukrainian army did not have any military units, especially units with BUK missile delivery systems, in the area close to where MH-17 fell. Prozorov also points out evidence suggesting that Kiev was planning a provocation in the area that would be blamed on the Donbass rebels, in particular noting that the airspace over eastern Ukraine was not closed to civilian air traffic and that a radar station in Artemovsk in the east was shut down a month before the shoot-down. He considers he may have been privy eavesdropping into a conversation in which a Ukrainian Defense Ministry representative and a security official were discussing possible Russian military intervention in the Donbass region to assist the rebels there and the security official tells the other fellow that something will happen which will stop the Russians from interceding; nine days later, the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet fell from the sky. Prozorov also shows how Western governments assisted Kiev in shaping its narrative of the Donbass rebels having brought down MH-17 by (the US) refusing to release satellite images of the area on the day the plane fell; and by (the Dutch) cherry-picking evidence provided by the Donetsk People’s Republic from the crash site and not showing any interest in collecting the actual wreckage from the crash site for several months.

It’s in the later half of the documentary that Prozorov delivers the most shocking evidence of British and possibly Australian intelligence involvement in setting up the scene for the shoot-down and British intel agents’ close association with two men whom Prozorov regards as the main plotters of the shoot-down, Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Burba and Major General Valery Kondratiuk. Prozorov also fingers Bellingcat (partly funded by The Atlantic Council and the National Endowment for Democracy among others) as a disinformation agency working with British intelligence since the so-called citizen-journalism organisation was founded a few days before the shoot-down and after the incident quickly became the main source of supposed information about the disaster for Western mainstream news media.

Prozorov summarises the main points of his documentary by showing how they fit into an apparent framework of a plot by British and Ukrainian intelligence agencies to create a provocation and distraction that would smear Russia and prevent that nation from militarily intervening in the civil war in eastern Ukraine, and to control and shape the narrative and distort the information about the investigation of the incident.

There is a lot of information to absorb from the documentary and some parts are very detailed and probably not entirely relevant to Prozorov’s investigation. Prozorov does not pursue the theory that two Ukrainian fighter jets shot down the Malaysia Airlines jet though he does refer to Ukrainian eyewitnesses’ accounts of having seen two fighter jets flying very close to MH-17. (At the same time, those eyewitness accounts didn’t include any mention of a BUK missile system, the launch of an SA-11 missile and the noises and characteristic trail of jet-stream smoke such a missile would have left behind.) The role of the US and its agencies (in particular the CIA, the US State Department and other organisations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and The Atlantic Council) in overthrowing President Viktor Yanukovych back in February 2014 and encouraging neo-Nazi extremism in the government that replaced him gets short shrift. Prozorov says nothing as to why a Malaysia Airlines jet should have been shot down when it is known that an Air India jet and two Singapore Airlines jets passed within half an hour of the Malaysia Airlines jet in the same airspace corridor.

Nevertheless this is a very valuable documentary on MH-17 from a former Ukrainian intelligence officer with much insider knowledge of how the SBU operated in 2014, and of some of the personalities involved in the plot to bring down a civilian jet.