Two hundred and ninety eight bodies in the middle of Ukrainian sunflower fields. People, passports, clothing and the evidence of who launched the missile that shot down the civilian plane MH-17 all hurtled to the ground at midday on July 17, 2014 in the Donetsk region. Most of the passengers were Dutch, the plane bound for Kuala Lumpur had taken off from Amsterdam, and many probably were not even aware of the armed conflict that has thrown Ukraine into bloody chaos in the aftermath of its pro-western Maidan revolution.

More than two years later, a report issued by the Joint Investigation Team this fall presented its definitive findings: the Buk missile that shot down the plane had traveled from across the Russian border from the city of Snezhnoe and back that same day. The plane’s pilot carried pieces of the missile to the ground in his body that proved the missile was Russian-made and not a similar weapon used by the Ukrainians.

The Kremlin responded through their spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, who said: “We have not seen any proof in the report.”

In the age of disinformation, proof is superfluous. Particularly in military zones, proof fails to bring certainty, closure or repercussion. Proof is dismissed, denied, fabricated and spun to accommodate anti-western or anti-Russian agendas. One side’s proof is another’s propaganda. Disinformation has always been part of any conflict, but it has fuelled Russia’s modern wars: in Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, and Syria, while “proof” has been deployed to keep them “frozen” and tensions high.