Four years ago, on July 17, 2014, a Boeing 777-200 rose from a runway at the Amsterdam airport bound for Kuala Lumpur. Aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were 298 human beings. As the plane passed over Ukraine and neared the Russian border, a 9M38 series Buk missile, fired from a launcher belonging to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, streaked skyward.
It was a kill shot. Bodies fell like rain on the fields below.
The launcher crew slipped back across the border to its base in the Russian town of Kursk. And ever since, the government of Vladimir Putin has denied any involvement in the disaster while stonewalling the painstaking fact-finders from the multinational Joint Investigation Team.
This is a story one would expect the president of the United States to have at his fingertips when he sits down for a chat with his Russian counterpart. So that when Putin slyly offers to, uh . . . help – sure, that’s it: help – with the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian cyberattacks on the United States, the president could fend him off as the world watches.
How about some real help with the Flight 17 investigation first?
Trump likes to exaggerate the danger of pushing back against Putin, as though the slightest disagreement could escalate to World War III. “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse,” he tweeted on the eve of Monday’s summit with the Russian leader in Helsinki (evidently unaware of the Berlin blockade, the capture of Francis Gary Powers, the Cuban missile crisis or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to name a few hot moments).
There’s no danger, though, in pressuring Russia to come clean. Quite the opposite: The request could be couched as an olive branch toward Czar Vladimir the Chesty. The United States once found itself in a similar spot, dissembling over the 1988 disaster in which a missile fired from a U.S. Navy warship destroyed an Iranian passenger jet with 290 people aboard. Time has shown that honesty would have been a better policy, and it’s not too late for Putin to learn the lesson.
But Putin can’t, or won’t, learn the lesson, because his lies about Flight 17 are enmeshed with so many other lies. Acknowledging the truth about the downed airliner would require him to acknowledge the truth about Russia’s shadow war in eastern Ukraine, which would lead exorably to an honest discussion of Russian expansionism in general. Civilian deaths in Ukraine would naturally bring up civilian deaths in Syria, where Putin continues to prop up the murderous tyrant Bashar al-Assad.
So what did Trump do instead of pointing out Putin’s allergy to honest investigations? He hailed the Russian’s preposterous proposal of help in the hunt for his own hackers. “An incredible offer,” Trump said, inadvertently landing on precisely the right word. Incredible, meaning not to be believed.
Putin is no truth seeker. He tried this same gambit in Britain recently, offering to . . . help . . . British authorities with their investigation of the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The British didn’t buy for a moment the idea that Putin wanted the truth about an attempted assassination in which his government is the prime suspect. He wanted to inject his own agents so they could help him spy on, disrupt, undermine and impede his foes.
It gives me no pleasure to say so, but this appears to be the common ground on which Trump and Putin bonded in Helsinki. Trump, too, would like to spy on, disrupt, undermine and impede special counsel Robert Mueller. The president’s unnerving remarks in the post-summit news conference made clear that he seeks a partnership with Putin to protect their respective hides from the decorated former Marine turned prosecutor.
Trump called the Mueller probe “a disaster for our country” that has “kept us apart” from Russia. “It’s kept us separated.”
Putin, added Trump, “offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12” – the Russian military intelligence officers charged with hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee. “I think that’s an incredible offer. OK?”
Yes, incredible – also shocking and appalling. Look next for Trump’s lap dogs on the House Intelligence Committee to start promoting this unholy alliance.
I’ve always said, and I’ll say it again: I don’t know where the Mueller investigation will end up. But think about what the president has done to impede it. He has attacked the Justice Department. Maligned the attorney general. Threatened firings. Fostered conspiracy theories. Dangled pardons.
Now he’s enlisting the aid of the KGB-trained leader of a longtime rival state. What is Trump so scared of?
David Von Drehle writes a twice-weekly column for The Post. He was previously an editor-at-large for Time Magazine, and is the author of four books, including “Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year” and “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America.”
Russian Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Russian ambassadors to foreign countries in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, July 19, 2018. Putin says his first summit with U.S. President Donald Trump was “successful” and is accusing Trump’s opponents in the U.S. of hampering any progress on the issues they discussed. (Sergei Karpukhin/Pool Photo via AP)
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