Also, from a profile of Strelkov on the New Yorker blog:
I warned about Putin handing sophisticated weaponry to pumped-up nationalist thugs on Dilettante's Winterings back in May. It took no great powers of prophecy on my part and if I could see what was likely to happen then so could a "great statesman" like Putin. I put the ultimate responsibility for the tragedy on Vladimir Putin, the man who armed and incited these troglodytes.Like the radical nationalists and neo-imperialists in Moscow, who have easy access to the airwaves these days, Strelkov has a singular point of disagreement with Putin: the Russian President hasn’t gone nearly far enough; he has failed to invade and annex “Novorossiya,” the separatist term for eastern Ukraine. Pavlovsky said that people like Strelkov and his Moscow allies are as delusional as they are dangerous, somehow believing that they are taking part in grand historical dramas, like the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, or “the novels of Tolkien.”“Strelkov is well known for leading historical reënactments of Russian military battles, like you have in the States with the Civil War reënactors,” Pavlovsky said. “It used to be a fantasy world for people like him, but now they have a realm for their imaginations.”
My speculation based on what we know already: The separatists acquired at least one BUK missile launcher at the end of June. Basic training takes several weeks. They wanted to show the Ukrainian armed forces they could shoot down Ukrainian aircraft at any height. A few days ago they managed to hit a Ukrainian Antonov at 20,000 feet. The downing of the Malaysian airliner was a demonstration of rebel firepower that went horribly wrong.
PS: There are now allegations that Strelkov is spinning a conspiracy theory that whole thing was staged and the plane was full of bodies which were already dead. Someone should have told him about Occam's razor before he came up with an excuse like that.
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