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I have read in another forum, that it's impossible that BUK system destroyed that airplane in Ukraine. The reason he says is - the airplane looks like shot by 30×165mm bullets - its not like blown by rocket from BUK.
I cannot argue with him about this because I have no idea how plane should look if it is destroyed by BUK.
So hopefully some technical people can explain.
Its highly unlikely that something other than a BUK was used to shoot down the plane. There is evidence the the "rebel" forces had access to these missiles and they also claimed responsibility for shooting down several Ukrainian aircraft with them in the same area. There also was the tweet that was quickly deleted claiming responsibility for shooting down a cargo plane in the same time frame that the commercial flight was shot down. The BUK missile is also a proximity detonated weapon that fills the target with shrapnel, that could plausibly be mistaken for bullet holes by non-experts. Finding out what exactly happened is unlikely since the crash site could have been tampered with by the "rebel" forces. This article is a pretty good description of everything.
This is a VICE news clip of a Ukrainian military AN-26 transport shot down a few days before MH-17. The AN-26 was flying at about 6,500m, or roughly 3,000m below MH-17. Reports say that it was not a shoulder-fired missile which shot it down, but a heavier surface-to-air weapon type. You can see the wreckage clearly in the video, but bear in mind that the AN-26 is a lot smaller than the MH-17 which is a Boeing 777-300, so there are less intact components.
Unsurprisingly, there were no consipracy theories regarding this crash, no 'US satellite photos' of the launch and no 'it was a Jet which machine-gunned it down'. Unless the Ukrainian military is incompetent enough to shoot down its own transport plane (even though the rebels have no airplanes, so why would they try to shoot anything down), then the only reasonable conclusion you can make is that the rebels possess some capability to shoot down aircraft at a great height.
The myth that an SU-25 shot down MH-17 has also been largely debunked - the service ceiling of the aircraft, detailed on the Sukhoi website itself, is 7,000m. It is not technically possible for any plane to somehow use its thrust momentum to reach up another 3,000m to the height MH-17 was flying at, something which the Pro-Russian crowd likes to deny. In fact, the SU-25's Wikipedia page has been vandalised several times by users from Russian IP addresses to magically add another 3,000m to the service ceiling of the SU-25.
EDIT: I asked this question on aviation.stackexchange just for you: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8344/can-an-aircraft-go-higher-than-its-service-ceiling/8347
Yes, it is technically possible that a BUK system shot down the plane.
@Ryathal, in contrast to your article, I'd like to post this article. My point is that there are many working theories as to who shot the plane down, and what type of weapon(s) was/were used.
I found this gentleman's clip does a good job of putting western media coverage of Ukraine into perspective with rather solid facts to back everything up. That's not to say Russia does not spin propaganda, but it makes you wonder about how trustworthy western claims and coverage are.
Until a thorough international report, provides proper analysis proving guilt, I suggest presuming all parties innocent until proven guilty.
There was also a clip of a BUK system, minus one missile, driving on Ukrainian-held territory that day. Unless the "rebels" managed to sneak it past the Ukrainian Army — which would point to their utter incompetence, improving the chance that it was Ukraine that shot the plane down by accident — I don't see how this could be possible. Putin's plane was also supposed to have been in the area at the time and Ukrainian hot heads may have thought they were shooting down the President of the Russian Federation.
