@1978
I am not offering an excuse for anyone, I am pointing out that assuming that ground folks are as air minded as pilots is a poor assumption. And it is. (If you are making a veiled allusion to a Russian missile crew deliberately doing this, I can't sign up to that conspiracy theory).
Speaking of "those responsible," there was some discussion in the MH-17 original thread about ops departments of various airlines, and various national authorities, assessing the risk of overflying a war zone (or something like a war zone, it's all muddy these days which makes risk assessment even harder) Some took risk mitigation, some did not. MH-17, tragically, flew for a company that did not. In the accidents I investigated, years ago, we classified some contributing factors as "supervisory error" even if they are not causal factors. (Causal factor here is simple: someone shot a missile and it hit, with a key hole in the cheese being that they shot at the wrong target).
None of the above relieves the missile crew who shot at an unidentified target of any responsibility for being careless and unprofessional, and as you characterize it, criminal (at the least you could make a charge of criminal negligence stick).
To make an assumption that the C2 (command and control) of the "Ukraine separatists" and their general discipline is like that of a professional force (German armed forces, Dutch, etc) is to my mind and experience erroneous.