US officials say they suspect SA-11 or SA-20 missiles brought down Malaysia jet

The New York Times. 18. July 2014

Buk-M1 missile defense system

American officials, who said a surface-to-air missile was responsible for shooting down a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 on Thursday, said they suspected that the missile was either an SA-11 or SA-20, both Russian made.

In the early hours of the investigation, determining clear accountability for a missile attack was impossible, in part because all three of the forces in or near the conflict area — the pro-Russian separatists, the Ukrainian military and the Russian military — could possess SA-11s, which are one of many legacy weapons from the Soviet Union circulating through this war.

Known in Russian as a “Buk” and among NATO nations as a “Gadfly,” the SA-11 was first designed in the 1970s. Successor variants are in the inventories of both Russian and Ukrainian air-defense units. A Buk system is vehicle-mounted and self-propelled, which means it can be moved around the battlefield, making it hard to track.

For ordnance, the SA-11 system fires roughly 18-foot-long missiles that can reach much higher than the reported altitude — 33,000 feet — of the Malaysian passenger jet. (Some variants of the missiles can reach above 70,000 feet.) Each missile carries a large high-explosive warhead, against which a thin-skinned Boeing 777 would have no defense.

SA-11s are normally operated in a battery, with a command vehicle and a separate target-acquisition radar. According to a written analysis by Doug Richardson of IHS Jane’s, a sole SA-11 vehicle “can also operate in stand-alone mode.”

“Its built-in radar is normally used to track the target being engaged, but can be operated in a target-detection mode, allowing it to autonomously engage targets that were present in the radar’s forward field of view,” he wrote.

This would mean the separatists might be capable of using an SA-11, too, even without a full battery. (Recent interviews with rebels by The New York Times found that many were veterans of the Soviet or Ukrainian militaries, including air-defense units.)

But whether the rebels possess SA-11s, as part of a battery or otherwise, is an unsettled question.

Ukrainian and American officials have accused Russia of providing the separatists with many sophisticated and powerful weapons, and the rebels have also captured many Ukrainian weapons, meaning they could have obtained SA-11s from either source.

Here are a several images of Donetsk rebels boasting earlier this week about acquiring BUK surface-to-air missiles.

News articles and tweets without a doubt confirming Russian rebels indeed have a BUK-M1, at least for a month on.

A social media post attributed to Igor Strelkov, the shadowy pro-Russian commander, showed him claiming to have captured Buk missiles. That claim has not been verified independently, and the rebels have been given to boasts.

The Ukrainian government released audio recordings that it claimed were intercepted phone calls between rebels discussing shooting down the plane.

The separatists have repeatedly spoken of other, verifiable air-defense capabilities, and have often been seen with other surface-to-air missiles — heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles known as Manpads.

With maximum elevations that are not much beyond 10,000 feet, Manpads cannot reach to the cruising altitudes of commercial passenger jets. Both pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian officials have said, however, that they have shot down helicopters in the conflict.