"And yeah, the murderous thugs that shot them down are evil beyond belief, but that's war for you...trouble is we've stopped calling it war now...that's an inconvenience as well."
mistakes like this happened to russian military (on several occasions), ukrainian, czech, yugoslavian and even american, some of those even during the peacetime
so we can't call them evil murderous thugs because of the shooting, however handling of the incident and not accepting responsibility is what makes them such, but we should have in mind several of aforementioned countries also didn't accept it...