In 2014, a Malaysian Airlines flight, MH17, was downed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian government blamed Russian separatists using ground-to-air missiles, while the Russian government claimed it was a Ukrainian pilot who caused the crash. The forensic evidence agreed with Ukraine, and the pilot Russia accused, Captain Vladyslav Voloshyn, called the statement an outright lie. And now that pilot is dead, supposedly of a suicide.
The BBC reports that Voloshyn allegedly “killed himself” with a service pistol in his home in Mykolaiv, where he was head of the local airport after resigning from the Ukrainian air force. While the police have referred to the incident as a “suicide” in public statements, however, they’re investigating it as a possible murder in private, according to reports. They have reason: Last week, an anti-Putin critic was murdered by strangulation in his London home, right on the heels of a nerve-agent attack on a former spy on British soil.
This could, of course, really be a suicide. Voloshyn has been, for four years, at the center of a complicated political and military scandal where innocent lives were lost, and it’s not uncommon for that to weigh on the minds of even the innocent. But considering the circumstances, it’s unlikely Captain Voloshyn’s story ends the way some are clearly hoping the world thinks.
(via BBC)