"‘They [the rebels] could not have used this system without direct Russian involvement.’
Given the source, that's a deliberate propagada lie, not ignorance like a lot of comments by people who just assume it's difficult and don't know any better.
In standalone mode any reasonably literate individual with the manuals can acquire, lock onto, and fire on a target. It's identifying the target, working as part of an integrated air defense, receiving the target information from a remote systems instead of the site radar, identifying false data being fed to you, dealing with ECM and ARM threats, etc., etc., that makes operation of them complex.
Recent and/or retrofitted systems even have modes specifically for leading operators through dry runs. This drills operators for high threat environments so they learn to go through the short sequence of operator intervention required as fast as possible in order deal with ARM threats by keeping the local radar on for the bare minimum amount of time required to pass information to the weapon when standalone mode is used.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/russia-caught-editing-wikipedia-entry-about-downed-malaysian-airliner/
Your Putinista rebels bragged about taking the plane down until they found out it wasn’t a military one. Now, all the Putin propagandists want to rewrite history. Good luck with that.
Are you Vlad’s brother???