> The construct "military resupply targeted" still doesn't add up, the plane was flying on 33000 ft(1) (which is the cruising altitude, obviously not even intending to land) and no plane cruising at the high altitude is delivering anything to the region the rebels would be interested to protect.

You're assuming that the operators of the SA-11 set were a) using the altimeter calculation tool as a standard practice, instead of simply acquiring targets, and b) that they were aware that an AN-24 could not cruise at the altitude of a Boeing 777 (which is the actual reason why 33,000 should throw a flag, as AN-24 isn't supposed to be able to operate there).

After all, if I was Ukraine and my military cargo planes were being shot down, I'd fly them at maximum altitude during the transit across the most dangerous area, so the rebels/separatists might honestly have felt that a target at FL330 could be a Ukrainian cargo plane pre-emptively taking evasive action to the extreme limit of that cargo planes capacity.

But the objection that a cargo plane wouldn't fly at high altitude even to land at a nearby Ukrainian base doesn't add up, as the plane could certainly overfly its eventual destination (at high altitude) to get to safer airspace and only then turn around and start its descent over safe territory.

> The only ones having a clear motive to shoot that plane that way are actually Ukrainians.

Given the number of cargo planes already shot down, there's evidently a perfectly clear motive for shooting down more, especially when you're already assuming that you know the operating schedule for the next cargo flight (and the separatists might very well known this, if they are under operational control of Russia' GRU).

And either way, there were tons of celebratory Twitter and Facebook posts by the rebels/separatists claiming that they shot down... a Ukrainian military cargo flight, posts which were subsequently deleted when the truth became clear. The "rebels shot the airliner down... perhaps by mistake" theory isn't just some vague NATO supposition, it's the thing that actually makes sense given the evidence available.

There's tons of evidence that the rebels shot MH17 down, even ignoring Ukraine and NATO's intelligence contributions, as the rebels themselves admitted it by mistake. The question is how the rebels came to the decision to do this, not whether they did it or not.

> MH17 had initially filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000ft above Ukrainian territory. On entering Ukrainian airspace, however, the plane's pilots were instructed to fly at 33,000ft by the local air traffic control"

The SA-11 can target aircraft far in excess of 35,000 feet. Remember, it was designed to fight the best American aircraft Cold War money could buy. Changing the altitude for MH17 by such a small amount wouldn't have mattered one bit to the SA-11 set.

> OMG STINGERS

As the nice Wikipedia article you linked makes clear, Stinger missiles can't make it to 33,000 feet. AFAIK, no MANPAD in the world can do this. 33,000 feet is a perfectly safe altitude for civilian air traffic with regard to military shenanigans going on below, as long as having advanced SAM batteries pointed in your direction by amateur militaries is not in the possible threat model...

After all, civilian air traffic has overflown Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003 and 2001 respectively, even with long-running insurgencies in both nations. Where's the outrage about that?

The reason Ukraine is different is because a certain large actor on the geopolitical scene has gone out of their way to make it different.