Summary
An Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 and injuring 29, with speculation mounting that Russia’s military may have been involved.
Experts doubt Russia’s suggestion of a bird strike, citing damage to the plane’s fuselage consistent with shrapnel from an airborne weapon.
The plane’s GPS system was reportedly malfunctioning, and survivors reported hearing an explosion before the crash.
Investigations by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia are ongoing, with black boxes recovered.
The incident evokes comparisons to the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
Bird in question
Any Birders who can identify this one?
Looks like a rare blue beak red tail Jay.
Ridiculous let’s make it clear what is fuckening here:
News: Kennedy has been in some sort of car accident at the parade… Video shown, clearly showing everything, then camera turns and zooms into window where the sniper was.
Rando: my conspiracy theory is aliens.
Rando2: there were two bullets made of untraceable ice.
News, guy is arrested with gun and bullets matching the scene, guy pleads guilty, 23 old women saw him do it. He also took a selfie and wrote it all down.
Rando 40 years later… Definitely aliens.
I thought they would say it fell out of a window
How shady of a country are you where you would not just take responsibility and excuse yourself.
People would be far more understanding if they would have taken responsibility, because after all, the plane was flying a weird path where a country is at war. So accidents are bound to happen.
“idk bro maybe it’s a bird” is what we get instead.
The lie isn’t for us, it’s for the Russians under control of their propaganda. They might never see the pictures we’ve seen or the final report.
Lying is tradition in Russia and politics
There is some term for the Russian “lying when both you and I know that I’m lying but we both agree to pretend that the lie is true because it makes accepting the situation more palatable” thing.
kagis
That’s it, vranyo.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vranyo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
Vranyo expresses white lies or half-lies in Russian culture, told without the intention of (maliciously) deceiving, but as a fantasy, suppressing unpleasant parts of the truth.
It’s something I’ve seen a number of articles commenting on as a sort of culture shock when people run into it.
Vranyo is a noun formed from a different verb, vrat’. That verb also means “to lie”, but it has a more colloquial, pejorative flavour. Vranyo has a dismissive feel: it is a lie that no one would take seriously, an excuse or a ducking of responsibility. It can be a mindless fib, like the story of how the dog ate your homework, or a tall tale.
So vranyo starts with lozh, the negation of truth, and goes from there. Vranyo is not about the proposition itself – it focuses attention on the lie-tellers and why they are lying. As one wag put it on Reddit, vranyo means:
You know I’m lying, and I know that you know, and you know that I know that you know, but I go ahead with a straight face, and you nod seriously and take notes.
The word has spewed consistently from the Russian side in this meaning. Following the lead of Russia’s foreign and defence ministries, Russian media have united to pooh-pooh almost anything in Ukrainian and western sources as blatant invention, whether that’s estimates of Russian losses (“propagandistic vranyo”) or details of how the Russian army levelled the Kievan suburb of Bucha (“the amount of vranyo from Kiev”) and bombed the train station in Kramatorsk (“they’re steeped in vranyo”), among the many atrocities already documented.
But when a government does vranyo, the nature of the fabrication can change. We may well be talking about “the big lie”, and the reason for vranyo might not be evasiveness, but contempt. Western and liberal Russian sources have called vranyo a characteristic tactic of the Russian state, even coining a new compound gosvranyo, literally “government-vranyo”.
With half the fucking plane just gone, the rest covered in shrapnel, and the alleged “bird strike” occurring at an altitude where birds cannot fly, I’m sure this is all just a big, silly misunderstanding, right?
Birds definitely leave bullet holes in the sides of planes.
“Stay strapped or get clapped.”
-Geese wearing explosive vests and little goose-sized jet packs
It’s just a rocket powered bird capable of mach 3 and filled with 10,000 tungsten fragments
Don’t forget signal jamming songs. Tweet tweet mother fucker.
Rüppell’s vulture has been confirmed to fly at up to 37,000 ft.
It could have plotted an intercept course rather than being a rocket, and come at the plane from the front. As long as the bird happened to be carrying a sufficiently large, armed, proximity-fuzed fragmentation warhead and was flying an intercept course, I think that would have done it.
survivors reported hearing an explosion before the crash.
Survivors are CIA sleeper agents. Nazi Ukraine trained birds to fly at supersonics speeds to take down the plane in order to frame the glorious motherland for this sinister act of cowardance.
Checkmate, USA!
/s in case anyone actually thinks this is anything but me doing an impression of a KGB agent on crack
KGB agent
FSB. There was some rebranding after the Soviet Union ended.
KGB sounds way cooler, FSB is lame
Well, there’s bureaucracy for you. They probably didn’t do any focus-group testing whatsoever to see what appealed more. shakes head sadly
Nah, it was definitely a coordinated effort by a squadron of supersonic birds with steel beaks. Couldn’t be glorious oligarcho-fascist shithole.
Russian accent “birds took off from perch on Buk TEL missile defence system having recently feasted on discarded missile fragments. Is great tragedy…”
Bird strike! roflmao
fucking russians man
christ.
I would rather believe if Russia blamed “other” Barry for this.
If you do not agree bird strike we do nuclear attack on world.
Yeah probably because there’s pretty fucking obvious evidence of damage from a proximity-fused frag warhead (used in SHORAD systems like the one that likely shot the plane down). I’m honestly just amused that the Russians are continuing to stick to their lines on this one. But they’ve done that with much bigger things (MH17; Moskva), so it checks out.
