The question is, why in the blazes does one shoot down a passenger plane? Target practice?
a plane at 34K feet it would be hard to establish if it was commercial or military.
They made a major f up...they thought it was a cargo plane.
Occam’s razor.
“The question is, why in the blazes does one shoot down a passenger plane? Target practice?”
The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. There is (usually) no military reason to shoot at a civilian target. But this exercise may be to disrupt civil life in an effort to get civilians to work on their government to end the conflict. On the other hand, in World War 1 a problem with using messenger pigeons was the troops got bored and shot at them. (Or, shot them for food.) It may be that the guys on the ground got bored and decided to use one of their excess shoulder rockets.
Outside of the special forces, the Russian military is poorly trained, poorly motivated and frequently drunk.
Oh yeah - and they are driving around with mobile SAM units with no command and control structure capable of shooting an aircraft out of the sky at 70,000 feet .
What could go wrong?
We forget the current version of the 9K37 SAM system uses a missile that is actually more capable than the old S-75 Dvina (NATO code name SA-2 Guideline) system. As such, the 9K37 system is easily capable of shooting down a jet airliner flying at 10,000 meters (32,800 feet) altitude.
Error..... they thought it was a war plane
Nobody can see what kind of plane is at 34k feet. Get real.