Sergei Mitrokhin’s blog at the Ekho Moskvi web-site, 18.07.2014

On behalf of the YABLOKO party let me convey our deep condolences to the relatives and co-patriots of the passengers of Boeing 777.

Now I am walking with my fellow party members to the Dutch Embassy. Recently we have gone to the Ukrainian Embassy on another terrible case I can not get rid of a feeling of a déjà vu of tragic absurdity.

From the posts made in the Internet it goes with a great deal of evidence [in the latter post Igor Strelkov wrote that a ‘birdy’ – a An 26 plane – was shot in the area of Torez, Ukraine, he also wrote that ‘they had been warned not to fly in our sky’, ‘the birdy’ fell, but did not harm residential housing’. And ‘there was also information on a second shot plane, allegedly a SU plane.’] that it was a passenger Boeing 777 which was shot down by mistake by the so-called “separatists” using Russian weapons secretly transferred to them by our authorities. Where exactly did the launch of missiles hitting the aircraft flying by transit at an altitude over 10,000 km was made from is not very significant politically.

However, it has been completely obvious and for a long time already that the main cause of mass killings of people in the recent months is a war in which Ukraine has been protecting its territorial integrity, and Russia, striving control over this country, has been clumsily trying to hide behind the self-proclaimed republics.

Simultaneous death of hundreds of innocent people is a tragic, but very obvious reason for the Russian leadership to do away with all their obvious hypocrisy and officially recognize the real extent of their influence on the so-called “Eastern rebels”.

Really, one can not administer criminal punishment for calls for separatism in one’s own country while supporting separatists in the neighbouring country at the same time. One can not lay the blame for the shot plane on Kyev, when there is clear evidence of the separatists’ guilt.

Our state and our people will inevitably suffer bitter retribution for such hypocrisy with such a bright shade of cynicism.

This step [of abolishing hypocrisy] would be an act that could lead to significant positive changes. And it would be a truly masculine act by statesman Vladimir Putin personally. Only he can stop this war today, because it is the key puppet master in this war.

The negotiations between the Ukrainian authorities and the self-proclaimed “authorities” which he has been calling to in such a pompous way today will have a zero result if he goes on to assert that Russia has no relation to the conflict.

The Boeing tragedy is a historic challenge to Putin, and, perhaps the last chance to justify himself before the bar of history.