it couldn't have been them. sound familiar? they said, their surface-to-air missiles, yeah, they had a few, but they consisted of ones like these, man portable systems, better known as man pads, although in american english that's a weird term so we're more comfortable calling them shoulder-fired missiles. they don't have the range to take down an airliner flying at 30,000 feet. they say, that's all we have, we couldn't have done it. for the kind of strike that took down this flight today you'd need something more powerful, something like these. these are a variety of mobile sort of truck-mounted surface-to-air missiles called a buk missile system. b-u-k. these are used both by the russian military and by the ukrainian military. though the pro-russian separatists who control the parts of ukraine where this plane was shot down today, the separatists were eager to tell reporters all they've got is shoulder fired missiles so. this couldn't have been their