>It will be interesting to discover whether the missiles were provided to these rebels by Russia as alleged, or whether the rebels captured them from the Ukranian army as some insist. My pick is that it will be attributed to capture whether it was or not, in which case blaming Putin starts to look a bit contrived.

From what (dozens of contradictory) reports I've read, it seems that the rebels captured quite a few of BUK systems, but fixed only one of them. Had Russia had a hand in this, they wouldn't provide this kind of partial and therefore unreliable weapon, but rather a full system with experienced and competent instructors, and this kind of blunder wouldn't have happened.

I've heard stories and stories about improvised weapons in our wars, then north-african and now ukrainian... people will do craziest things. Use crop dusters as bombers, weld booster rockets to RPGs, mount machine guns on tractors... anything goes. And some of it may look as advanced technology to those used to regular, by-the-book methods.