My View of the Airliner Shot Down in Ukraine

Josh Marshall notes that up until now, Vladimir Putin has mostly made the chaos in Ukraine work to his advantage, and the seizure of Crimea may come in the long run to be seen as a major victory. But now:

For months Putin has been playing with fire . . . Find extremists and hot-heads of the lowest common denominator variety, seed them with weaponry only a few militaries in the world possess - and, well, just see what happens. What could go wrong?

From Putin's perspective it might turn out to be worse if this really was a screw-up and not something he planned; I am sure he would rather be seen as wicked than  incompetent. Neither Europe nor America cared enough about Crimea to make an issue of it, but shooting down planes full of European civilians is a way to really piss people off.