she suffered an explosion. it looks like from the images we have been able to look at it looks like a pretty sizable explosion, too. we don t know what caused the explosion. we know the ship is operating under her own power. she looks to be heading more to the east, probably heading into port. our guess would be sebastopol for repairs and that s all we know. we have seen social media reports that maybe a ukrainian missile hit it. we can t rule it out. we just don t have enough information right now. what can you tell us about the significance of getting anti-ship weapons to the ukrainians for the next stage of the battle? how important is that that the west supplies them with anti-ship weapons they need? i would tell you that coastal defense in general, joe, is important right now as the russians try to press what little bit of advantage they might have in the donbas in terms of just numbers. so they re focusing very heavily on that east, and that s why mariupol is so important. if
that s a helicopter they re familiar with and the howitzers. those may be something they have to spend time with, but it s not necessarily as technically sophisticated as some other things. we ll try to get them equipment that they re going to be familiar with. if they re not familiar with it, that does take time and it s not just as simple as rushing it out to the front. i want to talk about a couple of places where it appears the ukrainian army or soldiers are making strides. here s this warship, this was off of crimea. this satellite image was taken in early april. we can t get a satellite image now because the weather is not cooperating. however ukrainians say and the russians actually agree that that ship has been moved out because the ukrainians say their missile hit it. the russians say there was a fire on board and they had to evacuate. that s one place. the next place is in kharkiv. ukrainians were able to destroy this bridge as this russian convoy was trying to cross it
we know investigators will be focusing on. absolutely. the other issue is, we know that the black boxes have been handed over to malaysia. we don t know if they have been tampered with or not. how can one tamper with a black box, david, and what kind of damage can be done? well, there s really really you d have to have very sophisticated equipment which only a few places in the world have to be able to take the equipment take the information off, modify it, put it back on when you re talking about tampering. what they could do is blanket out. they could get rid of any information on it and that would be incredibly suspect. the critical peace of information from the black boxes, however, is the altitude of the aircraft when the missile hit it. if you have that and you can look at the damage to the outside of the aircraft and where the penetration was and where it came out on the other side, could you definitely tell which direction the missile came from for this to substantiat
so having one ntsb investigator in kiev, that s better than nothing. but we re a long way from a proper investigation. and david, to that point, you and mary schiavo were talking about earlier in a way that assuages some of the fears. even if people tried to tamper with the evidence, that it would be in a sense impossible to do. you re not going to be able to hide what kind of missile hit it. you won t be able to hide what hit it. there s not a the love mystery here. to destroy that type of evidence, you would have to have a backhoe and a tractor and driving over it. right now you can see. i can see from the photographs, it is probably very well documented. psych from the photographs pretty much what happened and the sequence of the events. i think what s important is when it becomes a criminal case chrgs it appears it certainly will. when that happens and you have to have a chain of evidence and you have to have where it went from, the chain of custody, who took it and what did it
given what we re hearing is happening at the scene, their ability to reconstruct what happens? well, it gets harder by the day. things are, you know, frankly, literally decaying, and the evidence won t last there forever. of course, there is this other issue of tampering with the evidence. where are the flight data recorders? the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder. could there be a key piece of wreckage that suddenly goes missing? all these things come into mind when the chief suspects in the crime are those that are guarding the wreckage, itself. so having one ntsb investigator in kiev, that s better than nothing, but we re a long way from a proper investigation. and david, to that point, you know, you and mary swere talkin about this earlier, in a way to perhaps assuage some of the fears. if people tried to tamper with the evidence, it would be in a sense impossible to do. in this case, you re not going to be able to hide what kind of missile hit it, you re not goin