William Brangham:
For some further perspective on what might be behind this tragedy, we turn to retired army Colonel Robert Hamilton. He spent much of his career focused on the former Soviet Union, and he’s now head of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program.
Colonel Hamilton, so good to have you on the program.
You have a great deal of expertise in how the Russian military operates. What do you make of this speculation that somehow Russia’s air defense system was complicit in this crash?
Col. Robert Hamilton (Ret.), U.S. Army: So, first of all, thank you for the invitation. It’s good to be with you, William.
I think we’re in a case here where this is an Occam’s razor-type situation, where the simplest explanation is most likely to be the accurate one. So the evidence that we know that we have lines up with this theory that it was a Russian air defense system that shot this plane down, because we know that there was Ukrainian drone attack going on over Grozny at the time.
We know that the Russians were jamming GPS signals to try to fight that drone attack. We know that Russian air defense was active in the area, and that this plane was descending the land at Grozny when it was shot down, or was beginning an ascent into Grozny when it was probably shot by this missile.
A missile would have exploded in proximity to the plane, which would explain the damage to the fuselage and the tail section. The missile doesn’t actually go into the plane. So, all the evidence that we have at this point lines up with this explanation that it was very likely Russian air defenses that accidentally damaged this plane and then caused it to crash.