loud assasination with collateral damage to send a message

The most salient example of that actually happening was with Prigozhin. Still not a full civilian airliner. Collateral damage was limited.

If you really want to hate Russia for this, just remember that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I would say the most salient example is MH370.

The more you read about it, the more you become in disbelief. If it was an operation, it is one of the most advanced ones that I've ever read about. They knew exactly how to deactivate beacons, avoid military radar, there was a power and communications outage (computer interference?), the airplane kept flying for another 7 hours (without detection!), there was no distress call, ... and so on, which cumulatively is extremely unlikely to occur by chance, and would speak to extremely knowledgeable and capable agents. The bodies were never found, so it is possible that the passengers were offloaded. Imagine going to those lengths just to capture one person, or a group? The only other time I've seen that level of coordination was with Edward Snowden.

> If it was an operation,

Quite a big "if". I don't know of any reason to believe it was anything other than one insane pilot. One of the other things your "operation" has to do is plant the flight plan on the pilot's PC.

That is indeed another improvable alternate theory.

From my perspective, it's unusual to commit suicide in such a silent way, with such elaborate attention to detail. He could have killed the copilot, and had knowledge about disabling beacons, perhaps also about avoiding radar detection. But why? As an elaborate prank in creating the greatest mystery in aviation history?

Hijackings are usually far more loud. Distress calls, passengers contacting loved ones, a manifesto is published, or the airplane is destroyed defiantly (GermanWings, Q400 2018 incident, ...).

Everything about it is extremely unusual.

Given that any explanation must be extremely unusual, I think the explanation that only requires one weirdly competent and motivated person still has an Occam's edge over one that requires hundreds of such people.

So, Lee Harvey Oswald?

It would be interesting to know who was in the plane. Russia has assassinated this way before with Yevgeny Prigozhin.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66599733

So tell us. Who was assinated to send a message? Not a single important person was on the plane.

Everyone is important to someone.

With that logic you can claim everyone is assinated by Putin because everyone on earth is important enough to be assinated by putin.

Exactly, I once said something not very nice about Putin on reddit and if he reads it, I would expect he wouldn’t be too happy. It’s why I no longer fly on planes given the distance Russian anti air can reach.

To whom?

defectors, detractors. It was Azerbaijani Airlines, headed to Grozny, so maybe a passenger from either of those regions? Azerbaijan is in intense conflict with Armenia and highly dependent on Russian support. The region is deep in conflict, and strongly authoritarian. Plenty of people people who would need a strong message to understand that they're not as independent as they might think.

Of course you have to evaluate the facts yourself, but it's healthy to have some critical perspective.

Why would russia shoot down a plane if it was someone defecting TO russia?

"In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, changing sides in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state." - Wikipedia

You can have defectors internally in the country. In Russia, defectors have a tendency to fall out of a window, regardless of who might be walking on the street (collateral damage).

Nonsense. You would catch the person after landing instead of downing an entire plane.