July 17 - Putin's Use of Russian Mercenaries Blows Up in his Face; A Civil Aviation Expert on the Shoot-Down of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777; Israeli's Ground Invasion of Gaza

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 over Eastern Ukraine that was apparently downed by a Russian Buk ground-to-air missile fired by pro-Russian separatists under the guidance of Russian GRU military intelligence handlers who presumably supplied the missiles. The co-chairman of the board of trustees of the Kyiv School of Economics, Anders Aslund, a former Swedish diplomat who served in Moscow and Kyiv, joins us to discuss the extent to which Vladimir Putin has been playing with fire by arming Russian mercenaries to destabilize Ukraine, subterfuge that blew up in his face just one day after the U.S. and E.U. imposed stiffer sanctions on him and his cronies for the very covert military escalation that led to the deaths of 295 innocent civilians, including over 80 children en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

Part 2

Then we speak with a civil aviation specialist, John Hansman, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, where he is Director of MIT’s International Center for Air Transportation. We will discuss the many air corridors for civilian airliners that routinely fly over territories at war and what warnings are coordinated and issued by international authorities in view of the fact that American carriers were avoiding the region that borders Eastern Ukraine and Russia, yet this daily flight by Malaysia Airlines from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur continued to use this corridor.

Part 3

Then finally we examine the other tragedy in the news today and that is the ground invasion of Gaza by Israel’s military, following a brief truce for besieged and traumatized civilians to get food and water. Lisa Goldman, the Director of the Israel-Palestine Initiative at the New America Foundation joins us to discuss the apparent symbiosis between Israeli hardliners and Hamas hardliners, neither of whom seem to be bothered by civilian casualties and neither of whom have any apparent vision beyond a reciprocal cycle of tit-for-tat violence and retribution.