Let’s be clear. The murder of 298 people in the skies over Ukraine — including at least one American — is more than a “global tragedy.” It is a war atrocity.
And the blood of these innocent people is on Vladimir Putin’s hands.
Russia may not have been directly involved in the shoot-down. But Putin has been arming the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine to whom all the evidence points.
Putin, moreover, started this whole conflict with a stealth invasion of Ukraine — against all international norms and rules of war — designed to retake Crimea and destabilize a Ukraine looking for closer ties with Europe.
In the days before Malaysia Flight 17 was blasted out of the sky, Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists shot down two Ukranian military planes. It doesn’t even matter that the killers probably mistook the Malaysian Air civilian jetliner for a Ukrainian military plane.
Put it another way: This is what you get when you give separatists the wherewithal to shoot airplanes out of the sky.
We have our ideas about what the world might do to hold Putin accountable for the horror he unleashed in the skies over Ukraine. But before we can have strategic and tactical clarity, we need moral clarity about what just happened.
Unfortunately, President Obama only added to the confusion with his press conference Friday. Far from calling the attack on the plane for what it was — an act of war, committed by a party backed by Moscow — he stressed investigation. And announced he’s sending in . . . the National Transportation Safety Board.
In short, though we don’t have all the details, the pretense that we don’t have a pretty good idea of who brought this plane down is another way of avoiding the truth that the administration’s reset button with Russia has failed.
Instead of working for peace and stability, Vladimir Putin has responded by opening a war in Europe, with innocent men, women and children who had nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia paying with their lives.