Rescuers stand on Friday on the site of the crash of a Malaysian airliner carrying 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, near the town of Shaktarsk, in rebel-held east Ukraine. AFP PHOTO
LONDON: Both the Ukrainian and Russian armed forces have a track record of accidentally destroying civilian airliners: Back in 1983, the Soviet military—as it was then known—shot down a South Korean civilian Boeing 747 jumbo jet, while the Ukrainians accidentally downed a Russian civilian airliner in 2001.