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The MH17 Trial Part 2: the Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - Bellingcat

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The MH17 Trial Part 2: the Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - Bellingcat 03.11.2020 The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - bellingcat The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? October 17, 2020 MH17 Russia Translations: Русский When Dutch prosecutors of the court in The Hague read out their case against four suspects charged with complicity in the downing of MH17, they also explained why individuals previously linked to this crime were not (yet) indicted. One of them is former Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) separatist leader Igor Bezler, a Russian citizen with ties to Russia’s military intelligence agency (known as the GRU) who currently lives in Russian-annexed Crimea. The main pieces of evidence that previously linked Bezler to this crime concern two of his phone calls that were originally intercepted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU). One of the recordings was part of a conversation with alleged GRU officer Vasily Geranin in which Bezler announces the downing of an aircraft just twenty minutes after MH17. The SBU had released this recording on the day of the downing along with the accusation that the Bezler Group was directly involved in the downing of MH17. The other intercepted conversation was released one week later and became known as the “birdie conversation”. In this call, which according to the SBU was recorded just two minutes before the downing of MH17, Bezler is informed by someone with the call sign “Naemnik” (“Mercenary”) that a “birdie” – i.e. an aircraft – flew towards him. Both calls have been the subject of much speculation in the media, and were also the subject of analysis in previous Bellingcat reports. In this article we will reanalyse the birdie conversation against the backdrop of new information provided by the prosecution. In addition, we also go over a full version of the Geranin–Bezler call and a testimony that Bezler gave to the JIT, both of which have never been published in full. Based on the new details released during the trial, we conclude that the evidence against Bezler is inconclusive, but that it also cannot be excluded that he was involved in the operation that led to the downing of MH17. At the https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/17/the-mh17-trial-part-2-the-bezler-tapes-a-case-of-red-herrings/ 1/30 03.11.2020 The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - bellingcat same time, we also provide evidence from open sources that show Bezler has repeatedly lied about these recordings and that there is no reason to believe that they were falsified or post-dated by the SBU, as he and pro-Kremlin outlets have repeatedly alleged. The birdie conversation and the spotting of MH17 за 2 хвилини до збиття «Боінга-777» The Birdie conversation was uploaded to YouTube on 25 July 2014. Our most recent translation of this conversation is as follows: Naemnik: Nikolaevich… Bezler: Yes, Naemnik Naemnik: […spotted] a birdie fly towards you. Bezler: A birdie flying towards us? Naemnik: Yes… [just] one, for now… Bezler: A reconnaissance [aircraft] or a big one? Naemnik: Not visible behind the clouds… too high… Bezler: I see… roger… report upwards. Back in 2019, we had published the first analysis of the birdie conversation in our report A Birdie is Flying Towards You, in which we explained (on page 9) that “Unless MH17 was somehow spotted and misidentified a second time by another unit, it was Stelmakh’s https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/17/the-mh17-trial-part-2-the-bezler-tapes-a-case-of-red-herrings/ 2/30 03.11.2020 The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - bellingcat message that must have eventually reached the Buk crew one way or the other”. Our main findings were as follows: The person with the call sign “Naemnik” was identified by us as Valeriy Stelmakh; a Ukrainian citizen who was at the time the DNR’s militia commandant of the town of Dzerzhynsk (Toretsk) and a subordinate to Bezler. In the call, Stelmakh tells Bezler he does not know what type of aircraft it is because it is flying beyond the clouds, suggesting that it concerned an aircraft flying at a high- altitude. Several minutes before the downing, MH17 flew over Dzerzhynsk and then the city of Horlivka at a cruising altitude in the direction of Snizhne. Therefore, Stelmakh could have indeed reported to Bezler about the spotting of MH17 – his unit was stationed in Dzerzhynsk, and the Boeing 777 flew over Dzerzhynsk in the direction of Horlivka where Bezler had his headquarters. Bezler instructs Stelmakh to report this message “upwards”, which could have meant that he was to pass on the message to someone higher in the chain of command. We speculated that this could have been 1) officers of the DNR’s intelligence agency (the “GRU DNR”) who organized the Buk transport that day (three of its members are currently prosecuted by the Dutch court); 2) the Minister of Defense of the DNR, Igor Strelkov (currently also prosecuted by the Dutch court); or 3) a member of a Russian security services (who helped organize the dispatchment of the Buk across the border into Ukraine and back). At the same time, we also explained that there was a problem regarding this hypothesis: the SBU had reported that the phone call was made two minutes before the downing of MH17, and by then the plane had already flown past Horlivka and was about to fly over Yenakieve, meaning that the plane that Naemnik reports about was no longer flying “towards” Bezler in Horlivka. We considered the following two possible explanations for this (Birdie page 7): It is still possible, however, that Naemnik made an error when estimating where the plane was flying at the time of the call to Bezler, or that the SBU time stamp of the recording was simply off by one or two minutes, with the phone call actually taking place three or four minutes before the downing when the aircraft was still flying in- between Dzerzhynsk and Horlivka. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/17/the-mh17-trial-part-2-the-bezler-tapes-a-case-of-red-herrings/ 3/30 03.11.2020 The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - bellingcat On 9 March 2020, the opening day of the MH17 trial, the Dutch prosecutors first explained why Bezler was not indicted for involvement in the downing of MH17: JIT investigators were unable to establish that the birdie conversation “truly contributed to the downing of MH17”, and that it is actually questionable whether the birdie conversation could have contributed to the shoot-down because it took place so shortly before the launch of the Buk missile. This led them to state that they “did not, and as things currently stand in the investigation still do not, consider that there is a provable criminal case against Bezler in relation to flight MH17”. On 9 June, the Dutch Public Prosecution Service further elaborated on this by releasing a new video of the birdie conversation with further information about the recording. Some of our findings were confirmed: the person with the call sign “Naemnik” is indeed named Stelmakh, and telecom data indicates that Stelmakh and Bezler were indeed stationed in/near respectively Dzerzhynsk and Horlivka at the time of the call. However, they also released a more precise time of the call – namely from 4:18:07pm to 4:18:44pm Kyiv time – and explained that this timestamp casts doubt on whether the spotted aircraft could have actually concerned MH17 considering that the plane had already flown past Dzerzhynsk two minutes prior to the the call. The graphic shown by the prosecution concerning the birdie conversation. The prosecution further stated that an inquiry into the phone lines of both Bezler and Stelmakh “did not yield any information about any previous call to Stelmakh before this conversation”, and as such there is no information about who the original spotter was. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/17/the-mh17-trial-part-2-the-bezler-tapes-a-case-of-red-herrings/ 4/30 03.11.2020 The MH17 Trial Part 2: The Bezler Tapes, a Case of Red Herrings? - bellingcat From telecom data they could also not derive that the spotting of the birdie was “passed on to anyone else after this conversation”. While this in itself does not exclude the possibility that such messages were sent via a different communication channel, there is currently no evidence that supports this theory. If the spotted plane did not concern MH17, the question remains: what aircraft was Stelmakh talking about instead? All the available radar data, including the ones provided by the Russian Federation, have indicated that the closest aircraft to MH17 was Singapore Airlines Flight 351 (SIN351). The prosecution stated that just before Stelmakh made his call to Bezler, SIN351 was flying 25km north of Stelmakh’s mast site at Dzerzhynsk while MH17 was by then further away at a distance of 30km. This means the investigators are considering the possibility that Stelmakh’s unit actually mistook this other passenger plane for a Ukrainian military aircraft. Historic flight data indeed shows that two minutes before the downing of MH17, SIN351 was flying over Artemivsk (Bakhmut) in a southeastern direction. Unlike MH17, SIN351 did not fly directly towards the cities controlled by the Bezler Group (Dzerzhynsk, Horlivka, Yenakieve), but in theory it is possible that Stelmakh’s unit may have expected that it would. Although Stelmakh is heard telling Bezler that he is unable to identify the type of plane because it is flying “behind the clouds”, him or his spotters could have briefly seen part of the aircraft from afar without being able to properly distinguish it from a civilian airliner due to cloudiness.
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