The downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 highlights a fact long known to those watching the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine: you can’t expect reliable information about it from officials or media, whether Russian, Ukrainian or Western. As a result, relatives of people killed on the plane must now subsist on a familiar diet of rumours and falsehoods — often incredibly callous ones.

On Friday, Anton Geraschenko, an aide to Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, wrote the following on Facebook (original spelling and syntax preserved):

“Just now I have received information that terrorists — death-hunters were collecting not only cash money and jewelry of the crashed Boing died passengers but also the credit cards of the victims. Currently they might as well try to use them in Ukraine or pass them on to Russia. My humble request to the relatives of the victims to freeze their credit cards, so that they won’t loose their assets to terrorists!”

Mainstream Ukrainian media immediately picked up the allegation and spread it as straight news. “The Russian mercenaries are openly looting the crash site of the Malaysian Boeing: taking not just cash and jewellery but credit cards from the dead passengers,” Censor.net reported, quoting Geraschenko only in the next paragraph.

Dutch experts inspect MH17 bodies as Russia hits back

Foreign media picked up the thread. The Wire’s item, headlined “Looters Stole Cash, Credit Cards, and Jewelry from Flight MH17 Crash Victims,” quoted Gerashchenko along with a second-hand account “from a photojournalist at the site” and a story in the New York Daily News. That story, in turn, cited a USA Today story written by a reporter at the site. The USA Today article, the only first-hand report in this chain of insinuation, didn’t claim that bodies had been looted. In fact, it described “credit cards and photographs carefully lined up next to each other on the wet grass”.

The looting story having acquired the contours of a fact, however, the Dutch Banking Union felt compelled to point out that Dutch credit cards, like those in most European countries, cannot be used without a PIN: they are equipped with security chips. In the event someone does manage to use a victim’s card, the Dutch bankers promised to reimburse the victim’s next-of-kin. As yet, there have been no reports suggesting such compensation is necessary.

Did separatists actually steal victims’ credit cards, cash and jewellery? I don’t know. I am none the wiser for having read numerous news reports on the subject in several languages.

I have no idea what’s truly going on with the victims’ bodies, either. One of the rebel leaders, Alexander Borodai, claimed on Saturday that authorities in Kiev were “in no hurry to pick up the bodies”, allowing them to decompose in an open field in the July heat. On Sunday, the Guardian reported that the bodies had been loaded onto refrigerated cars of a train bound for who knew where. Photographs published by the London tabloid the Daily Mail show men wearing Ukrainian Emergencies Ministry uniforms loading body bags into garbage trucks to take them to the train. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s pradva.com.ua quoted a Kiev official saying that the bodies collected by the rebels and taken to Donetsk in refrigerated cars had been sent back to the mining town of Torez on Sunday. Monday, the BBC reported that three Dutch investigators were examining some bodies at Torez, but the details were unclear. Had bodies been taken to Donetsk and then returned to Torez? It’s possible. Anything is.

I know nothing for sure about how flight MH17 was brought down. I suspect it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched by the pro-Russian rebels who hold the territory where the plane crashed. They previously had shot down a few Ukrainian planes in the vicinity and had bragged about it. Unlike the rebels, Ukraine has no need of anti-aircraft weapons: the rebels have no air force. I have no idea, however, where the missiles might have come from. Ukrainian officials and media insist that they were supplied by Russia. They have published a video of a Buk missile launcher being driven somewhere, which proves nothing at all. The Russian defence ministry, of course, has denied any involvement. Both stories are understandable; neither is trustworthy.

The media exist precisely to inform people in convoluted situations such as this. Yet even the relatively few reporters who have managed to get to the site are unable to get a clear picture of what’s happening. They have no access to anyone with knowledge who doesn’t also have an interest in lying. Ukraine wants Western help in crushing the pro-Russian separatists and in imposing sanctions on Russia for supporting the rebellion. Russia wants to avoid blame and sanctions without giving up on the rebels, who do Russia’s bidding by keeping Ukraine unstable. The rebels themselves see obfuscation as their only chance to avoid condemnation for shooting down the plane.

Though modern conflicts are awash in media attention, what readers and viewers get is often an incomprehensible garble. Failure to ascertain the truth is another real-time tragedy.

—By arrangement with Bloomberg-The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, July 23rd , 2014