Hacker News Reader

Because the source is likely good enough to post.

MSNBC reported on some CNN reporting the other week, while acknowledging that they haven't independently verified it yet. MSNBC was not saying that CNN isn't credible, it's just that they like to clarify that they haven't verified it themselves yet.

ATC traffic is still unencrypted right? I'd assume multiple parties have recordings.

Yes, still unencrypted but I don't think any ATCs upload their recordings themselves. It's volunteers that record and upload recordings to sites like liveatc.net. So it requires that someone was already recording the ATC at Minsk for this recording to be available. Not sure how big the aviation community is in Belarus but I took a quick look and couldn't find anything.

Absolutely. You can listen in via pages like https://www.liveatc.net/. There are even recordings but the list isn't complete obviously: https://www.liveatc.net/recordings.php

Because (in the modern news cycle) being first is more important than the risk of being wrong?

To manipulate opinions.