Complete with stilted greetings and cumbersome dialogue that sounds like both men are reading from a script, the recording opens with a series of conversations between the two alleged spies, identified as David Hamilton and David L. Stern, Foreign Policy reports.
Throughout the recording, they discuss “preparations” for an operation that involves shooting down a plane with a surface-to-air missile and an eventual Plan B, which involves placing a bomb inside the plane — all for the purpose of staging a crash to discredit Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and the Kremlin itself.
But you don’t have to listen long to question the recording’s authenticity. The men’s accents are curious to say the least. One sounds British for half the recording until he switches to a more American accent. The other man does his best to hide his Russian accent, but it pops up at the beginning as he clumsily asks his co-conspirator, “How are the preparations?” But the most glaring hole is in the conversation itself. The men do not talk with each other like native English speakers and use turns of phrase that sound as if their dialogue was translated to English from Russian via Google Translate. Before signing off, the two say “Luck!” to each other, a common farewell in Russian.
The entire released recording can be heard below.
Conspiracy theories and propaganda of this magnitude are hardly new when it comes to the downing of MH17.
Read alsoRussian propaganda spins fake video of "SBU officers in Buk shooting down MH17" The latest theory coming out of the Russian media, and supposedly reinforced by the new recording, is that a bomb was detonated within the airliner and planted by Western agents. “It really doesn’t make any sense,” Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open source investigative journalism network, told Foreign Policy. Higgins and his team at Bellingcat have been debunking Russian theories around MH17 for over a year using open source information — geolocating social media posts and videos and using satellite imagery to trace the movements of the Buk missile launcher seen in the area before and after the plane was shot down. Based on Bellingcat’s research, Higgins believes that MH17 was most likely shot down by a Buk missile fired by Russia-backed separatists. “No other scenario has the same degree of evidence.”
UNIAN memo. Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was downed in Donetsk region on July 17, 2014. There is mounting evidence that the plane was shot down by a powerful Buk-M anti-aircraft missile system. All 298 people on board were killed. Most of the passengers, 194, were Dutch citizens, while 43 people, including all of the aircraft's crew, were citizens of Malaysia.
Malaysia has submitted to the UN Security Council a draft resolution on setting up of an international tribunal to investigate the crash. The initiative to create a tribunal was supported by Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands and Ukraine.
At a meeting of the UN Security Council on July 29, Russia vetoed the draft resolution on setting up an international criminal tribunal to investigate into the MH17 crash on July 17, 2014, which killed all 298 people onboard.
After the vote, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands Bert Koenders said the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine will continue the search for mechanisms to bring to justice those who shot down the aircraft.
On August 11, the Dutch Security Council reported that the JIT in cooperation with the Dutch Safety Board was investigating several parts, possibly originating from a Buk surface-air-missile system. These parts have been secured during a previous recovery-mission in Eastern-Ukraine and are in possession of the criminal investigation team.
