Kerry’s MH17 Misinformation

Analysis of eleven claims made on July 20, 2014

The downing of flight MH17 in Eastern Ukraine, on July 17, 2014, led to a tectonic shift in relations between the EU and Russia. The American Secretary of State John Kerry paved the way by spreading misinformation and agitprop in five interviews broadcasted three days after the crash.

On July 17, 2014, a Malaysian passenger plane that had departed from Amsterdam and was en route to Kuala Lumpur crashed in Donbass, eastern Ukraine, where at that time a battle was raging between Ukrainian government troops and pro-Russian insurgents. All 298 occupants of flight MH17, most of them Dutch, were killed. The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) investigated the technical cause of the crash. In 2015 it concluded that the plane was downed by a Buk missile. The criminal investigation was led by a team of Dutch, Belgian, Australian, Ukrainian and Malaysian police officers and prosecutors – the Joint Investigation Team (JIT). In 2019, it announced that the Dutch Public Prosecution Service would prosecute one Ukrainian, Leonid Kharchenko, and three Russians, Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov. They were tried in The Netherlands, by the Hague District Court. In 2022, Pulatov was acquitted. The court sentenced the other defendees to life imprisonment for complicity in murder and the downing of an aircraft. The concrete involvement of the three convicts is alleged to have included: expressing the need for and requesting an air defense system with crew; indicating a suitable firing location for that system; transporting, escorting, guarding and concealing it. Those who were directly involved in the downing of the plane are still at large. The JIT assumes they are hiding in circles of the 53rd anti-aircraft brigade in Kursk, Russia. A Buk Telar air defense system from that brigade allegedly crossed the border into Ukraine with crew and all on July 17, 2014, where it fired the fatal missile the same day. However, the JIT has no idea who pushed the button, who gave the order to shoot, and for what reason. In 2023, the JIT anounced that it had halted the investigation.

The impact of the MH17 crash on relations between Russia and Europe cannot be overestimated. Although American and European sanctions were already in force against Russia before July 17, 2014, due to the seizure of Crimea, relations between Russia and most countries of the European Union were still friendly. The European economy benefitted from trade relations with Russia and the import of cheap natural gas. The Obama Administration tried to change this. It urged Brussels to impose additional, tougher sanctions on Russia, The Washington Post reported on June 25. At that time, there were divisions within the E.U. Some countries feared sanctions would hurt their relations with Russia. This changed overnight on July 17. “We hope it is a wake-up call for some countries in Europe that have been reluctant to move,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a televised interview three days after the MH17 crash. “We think frankly that the sanctions may need to be tougher. It may well be that the Dutch and others help lead that effort.” Kerry referred to the sanctions package that the US had already imposed on July 16. It was an example for Europe to follow. That package included sanctions against numerous Russian companies in the energy sector, banking and arms industries. Americans were prohibited by law from doing business with individuals who had interests in these companies.

On July 21, the day after Kerry's TV address, American UN Ambassador Samantha Power and Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans gave emotional speeches at the UN Security Council in New York. They accused the separatists of denying investigators access to the crash site, suppressing evidence, engaging in looting, disrespecting the victims' bodies and hindering their recovery. “To my dying day I will not understand that it took so much time for the rescue workers to be allowed to do their difficult job, and that human remains should be used in a political game,” Timmermans stated, before flying to Brussels to give a reprise of his speech. Several EU ministers reportedly had tears in their eyes when Timmermans said he had known personally some of the 194 Dutch passengers among the 298 people who died on the plane. Reuters characterized the meeting in Brussels as “a turning point in Europe's approach towards Russia”. Countries that were previously on the brakes, such as Germany and Italy, now suddenly agreed to the measures desired by the US. “Within days of Timmermans' address, senior EU diplomats had agreed the broad outlines of potential sanctions on Russian access to EU capital markets, defence and energy technology,” Reuters wrote. “Timmermans’ impassioned speech, several diplomats said, made it difficult for others to hold a firm line against sanctions at Tuesday's meeting. […] But like a supportive family, EU partners rallied around the bereaved Dutch, putting national economic interests aside and for the first time going beyond asset freezes and visa bans on individuals to envisage curbs on entire sectors of the Russian economy that could turn the screw on President Vladimir Putin.” On July 31, the significantly stricter EU sanctions against Russia became a reality.

The MH17 disaster not only led to economic damage for Russia. The country's reputation also suffered a serious blow. Various Western media and politicians immediately pointed the finger at the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin had a 298-fold murder on his conscience. While Russia could previously count on some understanding among many in the West for sending “green men” to Crimea, it was now a rogue state in the eyes of the masses. The separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk also experienced nothing but misery from the disaster.

The repercussions for Russia and the separatists stand in stark contrast to the outcome for the anti-Russian coup government in Kiev. It has benefited greatly from the MH17 crash. Until July 17, fear of a large-scale Russian invasion prevailed and there was concern about the poorly run ‘anti-terrorist operation’ along the border with Russia in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. The MH17 disaster changed this overnight. On July 21, 2014, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko appeared on CNN. He qualified the MH17 as a terrorist attack. “I don’t see any difference between the tragedy of 9/11 and the tragedy in Grabovo in Ukraine,” he said. “So now we have to demonstrate the same reaction. This is a danger to the whole world, to global security.” It sounded like a call for the West to take military action, as had happened in response to the alleged terrorist attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The Americans then successively invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

Poroshenko almost got his way. An advanced plan by The Netherlands and Australia to take the crash area by force of arms from the insurgents was called off at the last minute. Nevertheless, the MH17 disaster brought the Kiev government much of what it wanted from the US and Europe: political and military support for Ukraine and tough punitive measures against Russia. On December 18, 2014, US President Barack Obama signed the so-called Ukraine Freedom Support Act, which paved the way for $350 million in military aid to Kiev. According to statements from the US Department of Defense, Washington donated one and a half billion dollars worth of military goods and training to Kiev from 2014 to 2019. NATO 'intensified' – in its own words – its cooperation with Ukraine. The tougher attitude of Brussels towards Moscow, so fervently desired by Kiev, also took shape.

Was MH17 really downed by a Russian Buk-crew? According to the The Hague District Court, the Dutch Prosecution Service, the JIT and the western legacy media the answer is in the affirmative. According to the author of this article, who attended all 69 court sessions of the criminal trial, no convincing — let alone conclusive evidence — was presented for the Russian Buk scenario. There are reasons to believe that something completely different may have happened. (I will discuss this in extenso in a book that I will publish this year.)

The fact is that in the public mind, Russia was convicted even before the official criminal investigation had started. Secretary of State John Kerry played a major role in this campaign by spreading misinformation and agitation propaganda that was subsequently echoed by others among whom were President Barack Obama, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, and Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs Frans Timmermans. Let’s take a look at the five tv interviews Kerry gave on Sunday, July 20, 2014. On this day he appeared on CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS.

Claim 1: “We know for certain that in the last month there's been a major flow of arms and weapons. There was a convoy about several weeks ago, about 150 vehicles with armed personnel carrier, multiple rocket launchers, tanks, artillery, all of which crossed over from Russia into the eastern part of Ukraine and was turned over to the separatists.”

This may be true. I did not study this subject. I concentrated on the Buk allegations. I’ve seen imagery of a military transport in rebel territory, filmed on July 15, 2014. The vehicles in the transport were either provided by Russia or captured by the separatists from the Ukrainian army. In any case, U.S. intelligence has not detected a Buk Telar crossing the Russian-Ukrainian border. No western intelligence agency has identified any Russian Buk system in Ukraine; only Ukrainian Buk systems. This has been acknowledged by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service during the MH17 criminal trial in the Netherlands. In court it showed a map of all known positions of Ukrainian Buk systems in eastern Ukraine in June and July 2014, based on a memo of the Dutch Military Intelligence Service MIVD.

Claim 2: “We know for certain that the separatists have a proficiency that they've gained by training from Russians as to how to use these sophisticated SA-11 systems.” (SA-11 is the American designation for the Buk system.)

The Americans have never substantiated this claim. It cannot be true either. A Ukrainian Buk expert who was consulted by the JIT has said that a Buk system is more complex to operate than the most advanced fighter jet. At the time MH17 was shot down, the conflict in eastern Ukraine had been going on for only three months. In such a short period it is impossible to learn how to operate a Buk system. According to Ukrainian ex-Buk commander Tarankov, who was interviewed by the JIT, this takes years. The commander of a Buk Telar has undergone five years of training; his subordinates spend a year or more before they are allowed to deploy, Pulatov’s lawyers revealed in court. According to the ex-commander of a Finnish Buk battalion, Esa Kelloniemi, who was consulted by the author of this article, it is out of the question for an untrained crew to receive permission from higher-ups to go out with a Buk. Moreover, without specialist knowledge, it would be impossible to fire a Buk missile. That would require much more than turning the ignition key and pressing the launch button. “The firing mechanism blocks the launch of a missile if a target has not first been detected, locked-on to and tracked, and if this target is still outside the calculated firing range,” Kelloniemi says.

Kerry’s suggestion that MH17 was brought down by separatists runs counter to the view of the JIT and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service. They propagated the hasty suggestion that MH17 was downed by a Russian crew.

Claim 3. “We know that they had this system to a certainty on Monday the 14th beforehand because the social media was reporting it and tracking it.”

According to the JIT and the prosecution the Buk that downed MH17 entered Ukrainian territory on July 17. This therefore cannot be the Buk that Kerry talked about.

On July 14 a Ukrainian military transport plane, an An-26, was downed. According to Kiev, this had happened at a high altitude and with a system more powerful than anything the insurgents had fired with up to that time. It probably came from Russia, they said. On social media there was talk that it was downed by a Buk missile, but this wasn’t substantiated in any way.

It seems the seperatists were in posession of Buk Telars. In Donetsk and Luhansk they captured air bases where Buk systems were deployed. The Ukrainians had already withdrawn from there, taking their equipment with them, but they may have left some behind. According to the prosecution the separatists found at least one Buk-Telar in an air base near Donetsk. It showed photos of this Telar in court. It looked non-functional. The electronics section was clearly damaged. In Luhansk the Ukrainians also seem to have left at least one Telar behind. On 20 July 2014 a video appeared of Valery Bolotov, the political leader of the Luhansk People's Republic (LPR). In it Bolotov expressed his condolences to the relatives and reported in the same breath that he had a non-functional Telar. He did not say how he got it. He invited the JIT to come and inspect the Telar and called on technical experts to repair it so that it could be used for the air defense of the LPR. The investigators of JIT never accepted Bolotov’s invitation. They never set a foot in Luhansk.

Claim 4. “On Thursday of the event, we know that within hours of this event, this particular system passed through two towns right in the vicinity of the shoot down. We know because we observed it by imagery.”

“We know they had an SA-11 right in the vicinity, hours before this shoot. The social media has documented this.”

“We know that they had an SA-11 system in the vicinity literally hours before the shootdown took place. There are social media records of that. The social media showed them with this system moving through the very area where we believe the shoot down took place hours before it took place.”

There are six videos and three photos of the transport of a Buk Telar across territory that was controlled by the separatists. Eight of them were posted on social media after the crash. Only one video, filmed in the city of Torez, and one photo, made in Donetsk, came into the hands of JIT before they were presented to the public. The identity of most photographers and filmmakers is unknown. Only two were identified. Of these two, only one was interviewed by the JIT. With his dash cam, he had filmed the transport of a Buk Telar in Makeevka. The metadata of his video indicated that it was shot in 2012. He said he didn’t remember the day of his encounter with the transport. One video was made by “a secret surveillance unit” of the Ukrainians in Luhansk. It was put on a YouTube channel of Ukraine’s secret service SBU the day after the crash. (See claim 9).

According to the Americans, the JIT and the prosecution the fatal missile was launched south of the city of Snizhne, from a agricultural field near the village of Pervomaiskyi. There’s one photo of a Buk driving under its own power in Snizhne and one video of a Buk leaving Snizhne, driving south. It is unknown who produced this imagery and the JIT wasn’t able to obtain the original files. The photo and video are of deplorable quality. Not a single detail can be seen on them. Zooming in creates a pixel salade.

Claim 5: “At the moment of the shoot down, we detected a launch from that area and our trajectory shows that it went to the aircraft.”

“We know to a certainty that we saw the launch from this area of what we deem to be an SA-11 because of the altitude, 33,000 feet, and because of the trajectory. We have the trajectory recorded. We know that it occurred at the very moment that this aircraft disappeared from the radar screen.”

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.”

The Hague District Court has not received any satellite data from the Americans, despite repeated requests by the prosecution service and the Dutch next of kin. Some, among whom former CIA officer Ray McGovern, say this indicates that no missile had been launched from rebels’ held territory at all.

A memorandum the prosecution received from the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) states: “At the time that flight MH17 dropped out of contact, the U.S. intelligence community detected an SA-11 surface-to-air missile launch from approximately six kilometers south of the town of Snizhne in eastern Ukraine.” The DNI did not comment on the exact time of the launch, but Pulatov's lawyers concluded from the memorandum that the observed launch could not possibly have been from the missile that brought down MH17. After all, a missile cannot be launched and simultaneously knock a target off the radar. A missile takes some time to reach a specified target. According to the investigators of the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory NLR the Buk missile that hit MH17 must have travelled for about 32 seconds, if the missile was launched from the agricultural field south of Snizhne. So the launch the Americans allegedly observed must have been from a different missile than the one that hit MH17. (More about this in my upcoming book The MH17 trial.)

Both the Russians and the Ukrainians provided the JIT with primary radar data. On these, no missile or any other object can be seen near MH17. According to experts who were consulted by the JIT this can be explained by technical factors like the high speed of the missile (mach 3).

Claim 6: “We also know to a certainty that the social media immediately afterwards saw reports of separatists bragging about knocking down a plane. And then the so-called defense minister, self-appointed of the People's Republic of Donetsk, Igor Strelkov, posted a social media report bragging about the shoot down of a transport plane, at which point when it became clear it was civilian, they pulled down that particular report.”

“We know that the so-called defense minister of the People's Republic of Donetsk, Mr. Igor Strelkov, actually posted a bragging social media posting of having shot down a military transport. And then when it became apparent that it was civilian, they pulled it down from the social media.”

“The defense minister, so-called self-appointed of the People's Republic of Donetsk, Mr. Igor Strelkov, actually posted a bragging statement on the social media about having shot down a transport. And then when it became apparent it was civilian, they quickly removed that particular posting.”

Kerry suggested that MH17 was shot down by mistake by referring in particular to two messages that appeared on July 17 at 16:37 and 16:50 on the news account “strelkov_info” of the social media site VKontakte. According to these reports, an Antonov transport plane of the Ukrainian Air Force, an Antonov An-26, had been downed. Kerry attributed it to Girkin, whose battle name was “Strelkov”, and who at the time was commander-in-chief of the Donetsk People's Army. In posting the message, he allegedly “bragged” about shooting it down and then deleted it when he noticed that a passenger plane had crashed. But none of that was true. The account strelkov_info was a fan account, by and for admirers of Girkin. Statements by Girkin were sometimes published on strelkov_info, but they were always accompanied by a banner saying, “Girkin reports”. That banner was not with the first and also not with the second message about the downed An-26. The prosecution acknowledged that the two social media posts did not come from Girkin or subordinates of his. It therefore did not put forward the posts as evidence in its closing speech.

The person who first reported that an An-26 had been downed was, nota bene, the pro-Kiev Twitter account @ua_ridna_vilna. The unknown person behind the account sent out a tweet with this announcement at 4:30 p.m., only to delete the tweet and replace it at 4:32 p.m. with a tweet saying it was “probably” an An-26. The prosecution completely ignored the utterances on this account.

A plane came down. It makes sense that those who had heard about it or watched it from a distance assumed that a military aircraft had been hit. After all, that had happened sixteen times before. In four cases, it involved a military transport aircraft, including an An-26 on July 14. It was to be expected. Social media went wild. Thus the rumor got out that the crashed plane was an An-26.

Claim 7: “We know from intercepts, voices, which have been correlated to intercepts that we have, that those are, in fact, the voices of separatists talking about the shoot down of the plane.”

“We have voices that we have overheard of separatists in Russia bragging about the shoot down.”

“We have intercepted voices that have been documented by our people through intelligence as being separatists who are talking to each other about the shoot down.”

“Social media, which is an extraordinary tool, obviously, in all of this, has posted recordings of separatists bragging about the shoot down of a plane at the time right after it took place.”

Within a few hours after the crash the SBU posted on its YouTube channel an intercept of a phone conversation of a commander of the separatists, Igor Bezler. In it, he reports that a plane had been downed. A week after the crash the SBU posted another intercept, this time with someone reporting to Bezler that a ‘birdie” was coming his way. The JIT interviewed Bezler. At the start of the trial the prosecution stated that none of Bezler’s phone conversations were related to the downing of MH17. According to Bezler the conversations were about the downing of a Ukrainian Sukhoi jet a day before the MH17 crash. Indeed, on July 16, two Sukhois had been downed. It later turned out that the SBU had omitted part of Bezler's conversation about shooting down a plane. In the omitted part, Bezler says it was a ‘Sushka’, meaning a Sukhoi jet. This was revealed by a Ukrainian blogger, Anatoly Shariy, who got his hands on the original wiretap.

Claim 8: “They have shot down some twelve planes, aircraft in the last months or so, two of which were major transport planes.”

In fact sixteen Ukrainian military aircraft were downed before the MH17 crash, among which four were military transport planes.

Claim 9: “And now we have a video showing a launcher moving back through a particular area there, out into Russia with at least one missing missile on it. So we have enormous sort of input about this, which points fingers.”

“We know that we have a video now of a transporter removing an SA-11 system back into Russia and it shows a missing missile or so.”

On the day after the crash, the Ukrainian secret service SBU posted a video on their YouTube channel of the transport of Buk Telar carrying three missiles in stead of four, which it normally carries if a Buk is being deployed. According to the Ukrainians, the transport was filmed in the early morning of July 18. The prosecution confirmed this and concluded that the video was shot on the outskirts of the city of Luhansk where at that time a battle was going on between the separatists and the Ukrainian army. So, the video was not shot in the border region as Kerry said. According to the prosecution, investigators of the JIT studied the original video file. The metadata indicated the video was shot in the early morning of July 18. The lawyers, however, revealed that the Luhansk video was missing from the SD card on which “a secret surveillance unit” allegedly recorded the event. A Dutch police officer who received the camera and the card from the hands of the SBU determined that the video file had been erased. The lawyers, therefore, said they didn’t understand how the investigators had managed to examine the original file.

It is possible that the Luhansk video is from before July 18. Indeed, at a press conference that was held in the afternoon of July 17, a spokesman for the Ukrainian government, Andrey Lysenko, reported that a video had been shot of a Buk Telar in Luhansk. Lysenko did not present this video, nor was it ever presented thereafter. Why not? Was this perhaps to conceal that the Ukrainians used the video to falsely claim it was made on July 18? Could it be that the Buk on the Luhansk video, that had one missile missing, had been involved with the downing of the Antonov An-26, on July 14?

Claim 10: “We know with confidence that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point in time. So it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists.”

Dutch military intelligence service MIVD reported that there were several Ukrainian Buk systems present in Eastern Ukraine at the time of the crash. Western intelligence had not detected a single Russian Buk system in Ukraine. According to the prosecution the Buk that shot down MH17 was brought in on July 17 and hastily removed on the night of July 17-18. This would therefore be the reason Western intelligence services overlooked the Buk. The services would only have spotted Buks that had been in the same place for an extended period of time.

There is no evidence of an Ukrainian Buk that was within firing range of MH17. But, as MH17 police investigation chief Wilbert Paulissen correctly noted during the September 2016 press conference of the JIT: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Just because there is no evidence of such a Buk does not mean it was not there and did not fire. A Ukrainian Buk Telar may have been put in position without anyone noticing.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided the JIT with a list of all the locations in the east of the country where it had Buk systems. Missing from that was a Buk system on a military base in Dovhenke in the Kharkiv Oblast, just on the border of the rebel-held Donetsk Oblast. The MIVD determined that a Buk system had been located there. Why had Kiev concealed its presence?

Claim 11: “Pro-Russian separatists have reportedly removed almost 200 bodies from the crash site and are continuing to refuse to allow investigators full access to the site.”

“We want the facts and the fact that the separatists are controlling this in a way that is preventing people from getting there, even as the site is tampered with, makes its own statement about culpability and responsibility.”

“There are reports of drunken separatist soldiers unceremoniously piling bodies into trucks.”

“They are interfering with the evidence in the location. They have removed, we understand, some airplane parts.”

The authorities of the Donbass Peoples Republic (DPR) have not refused any investigators access to the crash site. A team of Dutch air-crash investigators was kept in Kiev by the Ukrainian and Dutch authorities, as has been extensively documented in the book MH17: Onderzoek, feiten en verhalen, commissioned by the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and in a report by the University of Twente, Evaluatie nationale crisisbeheersingsorganisatie vlucht MH17. In a July 20 press conference, DPR Prime Minister Alexander Borodai complained that the investigators were nowhere to be seen. “It will soon be the 4th day after the event. Where are the experts? We are not in the middle of nowhere, the North Pole or Antartica, in a place where you can cannot travel easily. If you look at the map, you see we are in the middle of Europe. The road from Kiev to here takes four of five hours.” The DSB air crash investigators never went to Donetsk. In August they went back home.

However, three Dutch forensic investigators of the LTFO, specialized in victim identification, managed to reach the site. They were welcomed by Borodai, on July 21, the day after Kerry had accused the DPR authorities of refusing investigators access. To their surprise, they found themselves surrounded by journalists from all over the world. “There was press from Australia to the US, there must have been fifty camera teams,” one of them, Peter van Vliet, recalled. “I don't know how they got there. But it took us three days, without sleeping and with all the dangers that entailed.” On July 21, also a Malaysian delegation arrived. To them Bordodai handed over the black boxes of the plane just after midnight. According to the Malaysians, they had secretly left Kiev. The Ukrainian government had tried to keep them there.

Contrary to what Kerry claimed, no separatist soldiers were involved in the recovery of the victims. The recovery was performed by a specialized team. The local Ukrainian State Emergency Service (SES) recovered human remains between 17 July and 21 July 2014. The SES is a federal organisation which has local teams that, among other things, are responsible for the protection of the population in case of disasters. When a disaster occurs, the SES is given authority over other services. In the case of flight MH17, the SES was assisted in the recovery by local fire brigades, police, farmers and miners.

On July 21, the Dutch forensic investigators of LTFO, observed that there were no more human remains visible at the locations accessible to them. In a statement to the international press, Van Vliet praised the SES: “They did a hell of a job in a hell of a place.” On July 22, a train, carrying the human remains that were recovered by the SES, left Donetsk heading for territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev. In a letter sent in August 2014 the Dutch embassy in Kiev conveyed its gratitude to the SES. “The experts in The Netherlands, who currently work on the identification of the human remains, have been deeply impressed by the professional handling of the bodies by the emergency services in Donetsk.”

Kerry and other American officials never substantiated their claim that the separatists covered up evidence by removing airplane parts. It later turned out that an Australian-Ukrainian journalist, who was covertly working for the Ukrainian government, had collected pieces of evidence from the crash site for "safekeeping and out of reach of the forces of the Russian Federation" and had handed them over to the Ukrainian authorities.

Also, Dutch air crash investigators didn’t seem to be in a hurry to recover the wreckage. The Dutch started a recovery mission only four months after the crash. The lawyers revealed that only 30 percent of the wreckage was transported to The Netherlands. The plane was partly reconstructed. The lawyers found that parts that were not used for the reconstruction had ended up in eighteen containers. The prosecution did not grant them access to these containers. The court did not overrule this decision.

Note from Author:

Did you like this article? Then please donate. For five years I worked on the MH17 case without funding. I published two books on the subject. Since it’s a taboo in The Netherlans to question the offcial MH17 narrative, both books were completely ignored by the Dutch news media. I’m working now on an English edition of my second book, ‘The MH17 trial’. For options to donate, please visit my donation page.