Russian images of Malaysia Flight 17 were altered, report finds

MOSCOW — A group of arms control researchers have determined that two images released by the Russian government, ostensibly to help clarify why a civilian airliner was shot down two years ago, were digitally altered using Photoshop before being posted online.

Parts of one Russian military satellite image simply vanished, according to researchers at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies at Monterey, behind a suspect-looking cloud.

In another image, two chunky, tracked antiaircraft weapons appear in sharper focus than the surrounding landscape, the researchers said in the report posted online Friday.

“It is clear the images have been modified or altered,” the researchers said, after running the photographs through a suite of professional software used to detect fake digital pictures in court proceedings in Europe.

The finding is hardly the first to debunk important elements of the Russian government’s narrative of who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people aboard, in the worst atrocity of the war in Ukraine.

At the time, Russia’s state news agency, RIA, initially reported that Russian-backed separatists had shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft, but quickly backtracked once it became clear a civilian airliner had been brought down.

The photographs were published on the websites of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defense just days after the crash. They were presented as having been taken by one or more Russian spy satellites on July 17, 2014, as war raged in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian presentation asserted that “according to our information on the day of the accident, the Ukrainian armed forces deployed three to four artillery battalions of Buk-M1 missiles, and provided two satellite images to support the claim.