Citat:
On the afternoon of July 17, 2014, Pyotr Fedotav and his mother, were working in their garden in the tiny hamlet of Chervonyi Zhovten, a few miles south of Snizhne, in eastern Ukraine.
Suddenly, they heard a powerful blast and the earth shook beneath their feet, making them both fall over.
"It was such a huge explosion," the 58-year-old said recently. "It felt like the end of the world!"
The blast was the sound of a missile launcher, firing its weapon into the sky, he said.
"It was a big missile and it wobbled as it flew right over our house in the direction of Torez," he added, pointing in a northwesterly direction.
He said he watched as the missile struck a plane and fiery debris fell to the ground.
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Fedotav said he knows who did it.
"The militia were everywhere here, they controlled this area, and they were in that field," he said, with reference to the pro-Russian rebels.
Which field, I asked, for clarification.
"On the road between the village [Chervonyi Zhovten] and the main road," he said. "If you turn from the main road, it's 150 meters."
Fedotav gave a similar account to Reuters in March. The news agency also spoke with other local residents who corroborated Fedotav's story.
Later, a reporter from Russian state-sponsored channel RT returned to the village to interview Fedotav. At that point, though, he told RT that Reuters had lied about him saying off camera that he'd seen the missile launch.
A few months later, however, he repeated to me, and the French photographer and Ukrainian journalist who were with me, what he'd told Reuters initially — that he saw the missile fly overhead, moments after it was launched, and that the came from a position held by the Russian-backed rebels.
Why, I asked, did he tell RT that Reuters had lied?
Fear, he said. He was afraid that what he'd said could endanger him and his family, he explained. To be clear, I asked him again: How do you know the rocket was launched in this field, and that the militia shot down the plane?
"I was here and it was impossible to not see and hear it," Fedotav said.
Fedotav doesn't hide the fact that he supports the pro-Russian rebels but that only strengthens the believability of his account, which places the blame for the tragedy squarely on them.
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Nearly a year before I meet Fedotav, I drove out to Pervomaiskyi with a journalist from The Telegraph on July 22, 2014. I had stumbled across a blog post that used geolocation to narrow down the area where the missile's vapor trail had been spotted. The area put the launch site south of Snizhne — a theory supported by U.S. intelligence.
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We met a farmer named Vasily who pointed us to an unusual oval-shaped scorch mark in his field — the same field Fedotav described to me almost a year later.
"The field down the way burnt the other day. I don't know why. You might have a look there," Vasily said, gesturing to the area, which is tucked behind a tree line to the north and east, obscuring it from view from Snizhne and the adjacent roadway. He could not recall whether he noticed the burn mark on July 17 or July 18 of last year.
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Near the burned area were varying track marks, discarded water and beer bottles, cigarette packs with labels in Russian as well as melted fragments of plastic with a particular logo.
Military experts I spoke with were unable to identify the tracks. But the open-source investigative team Bellingcat believe the logo is that of Stelko Plastik, a Ukrainian plastics manufacturer that produce weapon containers.
In late June, 2014, three weeks before MH17 was downed, the company reported that Russian-backed rebels had raided its offices, taking with them more than half a million hryvnia (about $25,000) worth of equipment. Some could have ended up in this field.