Folks, we're on a hiding to nothing if all we throw around is conjecture and reheated Cold War rhetoric. So let's get a few things straight on the political front - to whit:
- Russia is no "backwater" or "banana republic". The state may have lost its "superpower" status with the fall of the USSR, but it would be naive in the extreme to assume that there is not enough infrastructure in place to play the situation with complete precision.
- Vladimir Putin [and I cannot emphasise this enough] is not stupid. From what is known he was no Party apparatchik, he was a senior figure in state security counter-intelligence. The reason he wields the power he does is because he knows exactly where every closeted skeleton lies, where every body is buried, and exactly who put the bodies there. He is *absolutely* not to be underestimated.
- If the "pro-Kremlin" rebels did indeed shoot MH17 down, they've just cut Putin off at the knees - and if the people responsible are not currently making every possible effort to vanish, they will either end up being handed over to spare the Kremlin's blushes, or face-down in a nondescript field with a shiv in their back.
- While the area where the aircraft came down is held by the rebels on paper, it is still very much an unstable region. Any person who successfully smuggles out wreckage with proof of an external explosion will effectively get to name their price with the Kiev government. If this occurs, whatever becomes of the flight recorders will essentially be moot.