2023-08-22 11:44:31
The revenge has come almost a decade later. This same Monday, the Netherlands has announced that it will deliver F-16A combat aircraft to Ukraine. For having, there is already an official figure. As reported by President Volodimir Zelensky, in a few weeks 42 fighter jets destined to subdue Vladimir Putin’s air forces will fly through the skies of kyiv. There will be no truce against the Czar of the 21st century, just as the pro-Russian rebels in Donetsk did not when they shot down the MH17 civilian flight in 2014 with 298 people inside. Vengeance, or justice; both are served cold.
tragedy in the air
The morning of July 18, 2014 woke up dyed crimson. In its front pages, ABC reported the tragedy: “Yesterday afternoon, a Boeing 777 of Malaysia Airlines was hit by a surface-to-air missile while flying at 10,000 meters above eastern Ukraine.” The life count was shocking: 298. At first the accident had been considered, but this story ended up turned upside down. Soon, the theory began to bubble that the culprit had been a ‘Buk’ anti-aircraft system operated by pro-Russian forces from the separatist region of Donetsk, 40 kilometers from the Russian border. And the truth is that, at present, it is the most accepted.
The tragedy had occurred a day earlier. On July 17, Flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam bound for Kuala Lumpur at 12:14 p.m. local time. One more day. The device left the Schiphol airport under absolute tranquility and, according to ABC, with 283 passengers and 15 crew members inside. Most of them were Dutch, although the range of nationalities included a total of 17. The commander and his second in command established communication with the ground on several occasions. Everything was normal. However, four hours later, when the Boeing was some 10,000 meters above the Ukraine, contact was lost.
Shortly after the company reported the disappearance of the device on social networks, it was confirmed that MH17 had fallen near the town of Shajtiorks, in the pro-Russian Donetsk region. An area where the fighting against the Kiev government had intensified, as this newspaper explained: “Since April, Donetsk and neighboring Luganks have been the scene of fighting between pro-Russian militias and the Ukrainian army.”
There were no survivors and the alleged accident shocked Europe; The images of the bodies, scattered about 15 kilometers around, were shocking. To top it off, US intelligence services confirmed that 777 had been shot down by a missile. Although not by a direct impact, but by the shrapnel caused by exploding nearby.
Then began the ordeal and the exchange of accusations. The then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, charged head-on against Russia by pointing out that the tragedy had been the result of “a terrorist action” by the pro-Russians, equipped with weapons from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin, for his part, called Barack Obama; according to a statement issued by the Russian executive, to “transfer to the president of the United States a report from the air traffic controllers indicating that the plane had crashed” due to different problems.
At a subsequent press conference, the Russian Foreign Minister appeared to offer the version cooked up in Red Square: the culprit had been a fighter sent by kyiv. Something absurd. That and many other theories that exonerated the tsar of the 21st century were replicated on the networks by related accounts.
Today the certainties are few, and they revolve around something as gloomy as the number of deaths. By nationality, the Netherlands was the country with the most victims (192), followed by Malaysia (44), Australia (27), Indonesia (12), the United Kingdom (10), Belgium (4), Germany (4), the Philippines ( 3), Canada (1) and New Zealand (1). It is not surprising, therefore, that the legal battle to find the culprits has been led from Amsterdam. The last move in this regard occurred in November 2022, when the court investigating the tragedy handed down life imprisonment for the two Russians and the Ukrainian who, according to the sentence, had fired the ‘Buk’. Although, in practice, his extradition was impossible.
What is a ‘Buck’?
SA–11 or SA-17; These are the acronyms for SAM (‘surface to air missile’ or, in Spanish, ‘surface-to-air missile’), a name given in the West to missile guidance systems that fight against aerial enemies from the ground. In Russia, on the contrary, they prefer to call this artillery ‘Buk’. Whatever it’s called, it’s nothing more than anti-aircraft technology. “It is a Soviet-manufactured system in its origins, and currently used by Russia, which has evolved from the first one that was created in the 70s,” artillery lieutenant colonel Joaquin Brochh told ABC in 2014.
As the Spanish military explained to ABC, the SA-11 consists of a radar that captures the presence of a target and a shuttle from which it then fires at a target. It is the embryonic version of the SA-17, which was designed later, and can launch four surface-to-air missiles with an effective range of 32 kilometers and a maximum height of 22 kilometers; although it detects enemies in the sky at a much greater distance. The ‘Gadfly’ (horsefly), as it is also called, uses a firing system with semi-active guidance, which means that it is necessary to point the target from the ground for the projectile to reach it.
The SA-17 ‘Grizzly’ is the big brother of the ‘Gadfly’. It has a vehicle that consists of a tracked chassis and that has a radar and a surface-to-air missile launcher with the capacity to fire projectiles type 9M317, 9M317E, 9M38 or 9M38M1. If this anti-aircraft system is characterized by something, it is because its launchers (tubes) are independent of each other, which means that, if one of them breaks down or is damaged, the rest of the shots can be carried out without problems.
On a technical level, it has the capacity to reach enemies that are located 42 kilometers away and can shoot down planes that are at an altitude of between 10,000 and 24,000 meters. Each of its surface-to-air missiles weighs about 700 kilograms and is five and a half meters long. And, like its predecessor, it uses a semi-active guide firing system.
Technologies have evolved a lot. At present, and as far as anti-aircraft is concerned, it is difficult to speak of a single vehicle that performs all the necessary operations to shoot down a target. «Any system, be it Soviet, Russian, or anywhere on the planet, is made up of a set of elements that are roughly divided into a control center, radar and missile launcher. But they do not necessarily all have to go in the same vehicle, ”Joaquin Broch completed on ABC. These can be self-propelled – mounted on top of a car or truck – or towed.
To shoot down a target, the aircraft must be found by the first element of the anti-aircraft system: the acquisition radar, which detects the target in the sky when it enters its range of action. At that moment, the information that an enemy has been found is passed to the tracking radar, which keeps track of the target (“illuminates” it in military terms) so that when the missile crosses the sky, it reaches the target. The revelation is also sent to a control center, the place from where the order to fire is given.
«From the control center the firing of the projectiles is ordered. Once the missile is in the air, it can reach the target thanks to the tracking that the radars are doing from the ground and, in turn, can modify its trajectory and its flight parameters to head towards the target. This process is done automatically, although the firing order is always human. There are more modern systems, but they all work more or less the same as the SAM. It was developed in the 80s and is fully operational,” explained the military.
According to Joaquin Broch, there are currently only two ways to avoid anti-aircraft systems. The first is to fly out of range. “This can be done by both civilian and military aircraft,” he explained. For their part, military aircraft are equipped with technology that makes them invisible to anti-aircraft and that, “once the fighter has been located by a shooting radar, they carry out a kind of electronic warfare so that they are not detected.” I can follow up.” And, if all else fails, they are also equipped with systems that alert them when they are detected.
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