Free Republic

<p>KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — An Air Force fighter jet has been shot down by an air-to-air missile fired from a Russian plane, a spokesman for Ukraine's Security Council said Thursday.</p> <p>Andrei Lysenko also said Ukrainian troops had been fired upon by missiles from a village just inside Russia.</p>

According to local reports, pro-Russia rebels were the first to arrive and have taken control of the crash site. The deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Andrei Purgin told Russian news agency Interfax that militants were on the site and planning on handing over the recordings of the plane to Moscow. "Of course, we most likely will give them to the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), to Moscow. High-level experts, who will be able to determine exactly the reason of the catastrophe, work there, though it is clear," Purgin said.

A Ukrainian official said Thursday that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down near Snizhe today, a town close to the Ukrainian-Russian border. The plane was carrying 295 people and crashed early evening, local time. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but immediate reports say that the airplane was grounded by a BUK surface-to-air missile system. The BUK, developed by the Soviet Union in 1979, has remained widely in use throughout the former Soviet states, including Ukraine. General Philip Breedlove, the commander of the U.S. European Command, said that...