themselves, which we have not done so far. when you say the ukrainians themselves don t have that system, are you talking about the ukrainian government in kiev, or are you talking about ukrainian separatists? the ukrainian government in kiev. the separatists you know, i don t know because they are russian, as we know. they re not separate, russians and separatists. we all know that. the head of the separatists is a kgb army guy or fsb army guy. whether they gave them that capability or whether it was a russian capability is really almost a difference without a distinction without a difference. but again, we don t want to jump to conclusions until we have absolute facts of the case. do you have any information about people on board, if there were any americans on board this flight? have you been given any kind of a briefing at this point? no, we have not. i just talked to some intel people, and they aren t sure yet exactly what happened here.
and he says they are all concerned and scared at what they know have been happening. i see in the last couple of moments transarrow, the russian airline, says it will no longer fly over ukrainian. lufthansa saying it will no longer fly over ukraine. that might be closing the stable door after the horse is bolted. it s clearly been an issue for some time. it of course raises the question now and a question that will be asked by family members of those on board this plane is why wasn t that done sooner? why were planes continuing to fly over such a troubled region, considering that two planes, and one, as senator mccain was pointing out, had been shot down already at 21,000 feet. that s exactly the point. and we know that the faa had a prohibition against flying over crimea and the black sea for u.s. carriers. so there s no doubt that this was a known rick of fsk of flyi this eastern part. it shouldn t have been as big a problem as it has been. but we re looking at the most
normally, anderson, you ll remember, we talk about the state of occurrence, the state of airline, the state of operator, the state of design. so in that situation, we re still looking at malaysia, russia, ukraine as being those involved. and we re told now that we have video from the moment the plane crashed. we are seeing this now for the first time. let s take a look. we ll try to re-rack that just to take another look. it s obviously very far in the distance from where this video was. you tonight actually, as far as we can see it does seem that
of them were passengers, 15 crew members. for you, what you re looking at right now is the path the plane itself took after departing amsterdam at 12:30 p.m. local time. as i said, bound for kuala lumpur where it was supposed to arrive the next morning. this is where the plane reportedly went down, an area in eastern ukraine. at this stage in the flight, the plane would have likely been at cruising altitude, some 32,000 or 33,000 feet up. the location and the timing certainly suspect, considering this is an area of extreme conflict right now, ongoing fighting between pro-russian separatists, the government of ukraine and the russian military based on the border there. the ukrainian interior ministry claims this plane was shot down, telling cnn that pro-russian separatists have been, quote, hunting us for weeks using anti-aircraft missiles. but at this stage, both sides are denying responsibility. we do have reporters covering this from every corner of the globe.
question, rene, about the ability to actually investigate this, to actually get to the site. and we re going to talk about that in the upcoming hour with our analysts and richard, just as we are awaiting president obama s comments ten minutes or so from now, still a lot we don t know but the picture is starting to form. it is. on what happened, the picture is starting to form. who investigates it i was just listening to the defense minister from ukraine. he has clearly laid out the case for ukraine investigating this. saying he is putting together the necessary investigation. so the ukrainians are clearly putting a land grab. we will investigate. the only alternative, really, would be that russian authorities would investigate, and that would obviously raise huge questions if there was some sort of russian military involvement at all. in terms of getting access to the site, it s either russian authorities or ukrainian