In an interview on Friday I said that I expected Iran to accept responsibility for the downing of Ukrainian flight PS752 within days, and to blame it on human error during wartime. To many, this prediction appeared counter-intuitive, given that by then Iran had mobilized its whole establishment to deny any link to the incident, and to accuse anyone claiming the opposite in waging psychological warfare on Iran. Less than 24 hours later (and exactly four days after shooting down the airplane), Iran abruptly made a full confession and offered its apologies to the victims’ families, and even to the journalists it had previously accused. An operator at a missile facility at Malard, a repentant chief of Iran’s Guard’s Air Force said in a televised briefing, had mistaken the Ukrainian airliner for an oncoming cruise missile, and had had only 10 seconds to react. Tragically, he had taken the wrong turn at the fork in the road.

This abrupt U-turn inevitably tempts us to draw parallels with the Kremlin’s handling of the MH17 shootdown. The similarities are indeed striking, at least at first glance. In both incidents, the armed forces of a non-liberal regime are accused of shooting hundreds of innocent civilians from the sky, likely over mistaking a commercial airliner for enemy aircraft. In both cases the regimes were quick to spread alternative fake narratives backed up by no real proof, and in both cases open source investigators were even quicker to debunk them. In both cases expensive, sophisticated Russian anti-aircraft systems had failed to safeguard against erroneously shooting down a plane that even open-source databases — such as Flightradar24 — were easily recognizing as commercial flights. The differences though are not trivial. Tehran, unlike Moscow, switched course within mere days of the incident and expressed unconditional contrition. The Kremlin is in its sixth year of prevarication, fabrication, and, at best, equivocation. There are objective origins for these different behaviors. Politically and legally, it was arguably less risky for Iran to make an admission. It had launched a lawfully owned missile from its sovereign territory. It had done so during a spike in military escalation with the U.S., triggered by the U.S. assassination of its general, and after it had been threatened with imminent cruise missile attack by President Trump. Mistakes happen, especially, as an uncharacteristically understanding Donald Trump said, in “rough neighborhoods.” It was also harder to deny the truth in the Iranian case. The whole world’s electronic eyes had been trained on Iran in the hours after its missile attack on U.S. bases in Iraq. Objective satellite data from any number of satellites would invariably have caught — as they did — the missiles’ launch. International investigators would inevitably find — as they did — shrapnel perforations in the plane’s hull. And unlike in the case with MH17, there was no other missile-equipped army within reach of the airplane that Tehran could pin the blame to. Iran also could not afford to play the long game that Russia thinks it can. At a peak of volatility in its relationship with the West, and with an economy decimated by sanctions, Iran needs all the friends (or at least as few enemies) as possible. The West was also pragmatic enough to hint that a mea culpa would be welcomed and might be sufficient. All these reasons combined made the full confession a pragmatic and inevitable choice. The situation with Russia in July 2014 was different. Russian military units were waging an undeclared, and thus unlawful, war on Ukrainian territory. The BUK Telar that shot down MH17 was illegally transported over the Ukrainian border in the dead of night. By all accounts, Russian active-duty soldiers accompanied and operated the sophisticated machine. A full confession would have been an admission to much more than an accidental shootdown.