That may become obvious shortly here.
This plane may have been targeted for no other reason than that it was coming from the West -- from the direction of Kiev -- and both are linked together in Russian minds and hated.
If the plane was flying north-south they would not have touched it but west-east was fair game.
And look at the net effect of the downing of MH17 -- the once highly travelled air corridor over eastern Ukraine has been shut down causing now greater difficulty and expense for airlines travelling east-west.
This is Putin punishing the West for its sanctions against Russia.
Their excuse that they thought it was filled with Ukrainian troops is laughable because the aircraft was 25 miles from crossing the Russian border at 33K. Where in the hell did they think it was going to land to be a threat to them?
or they did not know how to read/decipher what they were looking at...but great point about punishing the west, but that would take one evil sub-human person to do that intentionally
Mike