From the New York Times:

MOSCOW — A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 with 295 people aboard crashed on Thursday in eastern Ukraine near the Russian border, an area roiled by fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian forces. Ukrainian officials said the plane might have been shot down, possibly by a Russian-made antiaircraft system.

There were no reported survivors and journalists have painted some disturbing pictures of the debris and corpses in a "wheat field with purple flowers." President Obama briefly addressed the crash at an event in Delaware as a "terrible tragedy" but didn't say much more.

Ukraine has recently accused the Russian military of shooting down a fighter jet and shelling Ukrainian towns with missiles fired from Russian soil. The blog Ukraine@War has been using crowd-sourced videos and geolocation techniques to document Russian missiles fired over the border and claims Russian air-defense missile systems shot down the passenger plane.

If Ukraine is proven correct, Russia can no longer hide behind mysterious, so-called "separatists" and we'll finally have confirmation that Ukraine is not embroiled in a civil war—war is being covertly waged on the country by Putin's armed forces. And if those forces accidentally shot down a passenger plane en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, the world community might finally have the excuse it needs to get tough about Putin and what appears to be a thinly disguised land grab.

When Crimea fell to Russian forces and people compared it to Hitler's invasion of the Sudetenland (bully country invades neighbor under the pretext of "protecting" ethnic members of the bully country from some ginned-up threat), some commentators called foul, saying that was hyperbole.

But every new piece of information coming from the Ukrainian conflict makes the Sudetenland comparison seem more and more correct.