Re: Eh. what?
"By far the most plausible explanation is that the rebels screwed up and shot down an aircraft they didn't intend to shoot down with a Russian-supplied system. Of course, their only possible course of action after doing so was deny, deny, deny."
If that was a rebels' Buk, you would see a lot of evidence of this - satellite images of position, radar emission detection, rocket launch flare detection, and so on. Nothing like this has not been published.
My opinion is that the drunken Ukrainian Buk crew was training to target aircrafts to prepare to Russian invasion. Of course, they was using the civil aircrafts flying over there for training, but the system accidentally switched to operational mode from training mode.