Russia will have to take its case regarding the shootdown of the Il-76 to the United Nations to break through the information blockade around the incident put up by Western governments and media, former US Department of Defense senior security policy analyst Michael Maloof believes.
“The Western media is hardly mentioning this incident at all,” Maloof told Sputnik, commenting on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks earlier in the day revealing that Russian investigators had concluded that the Il-76 was shot down using a Patriot missile system. “Now, the revelation that it was a Patriot missile has not been reported whatsoever, at least here in Washington. This is quite extraordinary, and I think that they’re going to want to bury that,” the observer said.
“What Russia needs to do now is show its evidence of the Patriot missile system used in the incident, to present its evidence to the public in a prominent place and then go “to the United nations with any evidence to be displayed in front of the naysayers in the UN Security Council,” Maloof emphasized.
A week on since the shootdown, Maloof remains confident that the incident was likely caused by a “miscommunication” “somewhere along the line” on the Ukrainian side, or an “amateurish and…crazy,” purposeful criminal act to try to blame Russia.
“I don’t think the US had any knowledge,” Maloof said, when asked about the Pentagon’s possible role in the crisis.
“They are leaving the execution of the war up to the Ukrainians. And they’re clearly misusing equipment. They are actually siphoning off equipment. As Mr. Lavrov pointed out the other day, they’re finding this equipment winding up in the Scandinavian countries of all places. And now we have evidence that some of the equipment is winding up with the drug cartels in Mexico and being used against our own border patrols. I think all of this has got to stop. And yet the Biden administration wants to send billions more to Ukraine, but not do anything for the border,” the observer stressed, characterizing the conflict as a “lost cause.”
Maloof believes the Pentagon “could probably figure…out” who really shot down the Il-76 using radar signatures. “If they can get their hands on the radar information and read that data, but clearly there was a shootdown. And whether it was purposeful or not by the Ukrainians, I don’t know, but I think the Pentagon is going to have to respond to this. Questions should be raised at the press conferences and certainly addressed to the Pentagon during their daily press briefings [about] what they knew and when they knew it and what did they know.”
Otherwise, he warned, the Western media and governments will continue to try to cover up the “embarrassing” criminal behavior of their proxies, just as they have any details about the origins of the Ukrainian crisis going back to before 2022.
“Look, for eight years, the Western media hardly ever reported on what was going on in Donetsk and the daily shelling that Kiev was launching against Russian-speaking people in the eastern part of Ukraine. No mention at all. And then people wonder ‘what’s this all about?’ Well of course they’re going to wonder because they haven’t been told anything. And the more that’s brought out – it’s the transparency business of sunshine, revealing and cleansing things, it’s got to be done. Especially if countries plan to go to war over it,” Maloof summarized.