My Take on Downed Malaysian Jet in Eastern Ukraine

The understatement of the year may be that there is a lot of bad feeling going around concerning the recently shot-down Malaysia Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, causing the deaths of nearly 300 passengers and crew, among them many Dutch.  I'm convinced that Russian separatist rebels, armed with anti-aircraft missiles from Putin's Russia, shot it down mistaking it for Ukrainian fighters that were actively engaging them in warfare.  It is a terrible tragedy, but in the context of war, it is also an accident.  Clearly no one was trying to shoot down a passenger jet.  The U.S. and most every other nation under wartime conditions have committed their own share of accidents with innocent deaths resulting from them.  The corridor of the flight, which apparently was heavily used (but no more, obviously), took it directly over the combat zone.  Many critics in the West are pointing an accusatory finger at President Putin for arming the rebels with missiles sophisticated enough to target and hit such high flying planes, and I think he is definitely operating in a warmongering, land-grabbing mode.  But I believe that you can't go about business like usual in your own little peaceful bubble and intrude into war zones without expecting some potentially catastrophic results to arise.  The main problem I'm having with Putin and the Russian rebels is the cover-up and denial they seem to be engaged in following the fact, which they should have admitted as an obvious mistake and assumed responsibility and apologized for while cooperating with the crash investigators and recovery team.

The Russians living in eastern Ukraine, before the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 into its constituent republics, had always considered themselves as being part of Russia even though Krushchev in the 1950s had redrawn their area into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.  But back then it was all one big country, and they didn't have to submit as a minority within another country to that country's majority political direction.  The same goes for the Crimean region that Russia just annexed through force a few weeks ago.  Seeing for years within Ukraine that there was a deep division between the regions populated chiefly by ethnic Russians and the majority Ukrainian areas that caused serious crises in previous elections, the leaders in Ukraine should have been wise enough to allow referendums in the affected areas for the people to democratically determine their destiny, be it remaining with Ukraine, becoming independent, or rejoining Russia.  This way that Putin has of crisis-by-armed-crisis confrontational behavior destroys any trust or good will toward Russia that had been built up after the fall of the USSR and is only going to serve to militarize the rest of Europe in fear that he will seek further territorial gains elsewhere...