After the Malaysia Airlines passenger plane crashed on July 17 in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast with 298 people on board, Kremlin-backed enthusiastically claimed credit, saying they thought they had shot down another Ukrainian military transport plane. “We did warn you – do not fly in our sky,” Kremlin-backed separatist leader Igor Girkin, a Russian intelligence service officer, wrote on his official Vkontakte soon after the tragedy.

Though when the gravity of the mistake became obvious, the Russian-backed insurgents backpedaled and claimed innocence.