In the category of It’s really unlikely but not impossible, my brain is connecting my comments regarding a possible invasion of Russia by China with today’s tragedy:
A China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane carrying 132 people slammed into the mountains of the southern province of Guangxi on Monday, according to China’s aviation authority,in what is likely to become the country’s deadliest plane crash in more than two decades.
Footage of the crash captured by a local mining company showed the plane nosediving sharply into the mountainside in what appeared to be an almost vertical drop. In its statement, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said the flight carrying 123 passengers and nine crew members had lost contact over the city of Wuzhou in Guangxi. [WaPo]
The mentioned footage is at the WaPo link.
Could this be a warn-off from Russia’s President Putin to China’s Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and, thus, leader of China?
I dunno. On the Yes side is a Russian history of shooting down airliners, principally Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2019, although 1983 saw KAL Flight 007 shot down by the Soviet Union. The latter may have been a mistake, but the former appears to have been a deliberate warning to Ukraine’s government.
On the No side, a gross and violent warning to the Chinese like this could easily be interpreted wrongly, resulting in a nearly required return missile – or an invasion of a Russian state that appears to be tottering along on the strength of a decaying strongman and whatever power structure is hanging with him. Practically speaking, there has been no reports of the physical manifestations of a missile, such as sonic booms or contrails, at least in what I have read, and I have no connections in our intelligence community to make further inquiry. I suppose a cyber attack could have been carried out, but I do not have the experience or expertise to even guess at the vulnerability of a Boeing 737 under Chinese management to a conventional or specialized cyber attack. And, if such is possible, then the Russians have just revealed a capability of which the Chinese may not have been aware. That can be a huge mistake all on its own.
So, in my mind, I think this is likely some sort of tragic accident, and not a Russia political maneuver. But I am assuming some sort of rationality in the Kremlin, and it’s not entirely clear that Putin is still rational.
