Hi I also would like to thank Feanor for his excellent contributions to this thread.
Although I have been reading this forum for a few years now, this will also be my first contribution to this forum.
The Dutch government currently has advanced plants to send an international armed mission towards the crash site to secure the wreckage, the surrounding area and to protect the independent investigators, which I personally think is a foolish idea as the risks are huge.
These “separatists” aren’t some ragamuffin group of rebels, armed with nothing more than some PKM’s, RPG’s and AK47’s like in Afghanistan or Mali. We would literally be sticking our head in an anthill in which the ants are drunk and armed with tanks, artillery and antiaircraft missiles.
In order to secure the crash site and the surrounding area we would literally need thousands of troops, artillery, armor and of course both fixed wing and rotary air support. You would basically need enough troops and equipment to fight a small war.
And as the rebels have already stated that they would not tolerate such a mission, even establishing this secured area and subsequently resupplying the troops within would be a nightmare as the rebel’s control the surrounding countryside and have SAM’s, so both ground and air insertion and resupply would be very difficult.
The rebels will inevitably take some potshots (or even send over some grad salvos) at these troops, so a direct confrontation, with all its inherent risks involved, would basically be inevitable. When such a confrontation happens, Russian citizens will either directly or indirectly get hurt or killed, so a political confrontation with Russia is thus bound to happen.
It’s my personal opinion that the whole idea is just basically silly to start with, as the Dutch have no vested interests in this conflict and have no living citizens in immediate threat. But feel free to correct me in this.
