U.S. Calls on Russia to Ensure Access to Jet Crash Site
The U.S. urged Russia to ensure
investigators full access to the crash site of a Malaysian
Airlines passenger jet shot down last week in an area of eastern
Ukraine patrolled by pro-Russia rebels.
The U.S. is “deeply concerned” about the rebels’ refusal
to provide safe and unfettered access, Jen Psaki, a State
Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We urge Russia to
honor its commitments and to publicly call on the separatists to
do the same,” she said.
The statement shows escalating pressure on Russian
President Vladimir Putin three days after the crash that killed
298 people intensified global attention on the crisis that has
divided the east European nation. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said yesterday the
European Union will need to reconsider its approach to Russia.
As many as 900 rebels are putting investigators under
pressure, according to Ukrainian Deputy Premier Volodymyr
Hroisman. An official with the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe, Michael Bociurkiw, said the atmosphere at
the site yesterday was “surreal.”
“The site is not secure, and there are multiple reports of
bodies being removed, parts of the plane and other debris being
hauled away, and potential evidence tampered with,” the State
Department’s Psaki wrote. “This is unacceptable and an affront
to all those who lost loved ones and to the dignity the victims
deserve.”
Psaki also said that monitors were allowed less than three
hours access to only a small area of the site on July 19.
Moving Bodies
The OSCE’s Bociurkiw provided a phone briefing from the
crash site near Torez, about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the
Russian border in eastern Ukraine. “There is a lot of security
here, with many heavily armed people,” he said.
The 24-member OSCE team saw unidentified people moving
bodies to the side of the road, he said.
Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Defense Ministry,
told reporters in Kyiv that “Russian mercenaries loaded bodies
onto trucks” and delivered them to Donetsk to search for debris
in the victims from the missile believed to have downed the
plane on July 17.
He said the rebels were examining the bodies to find and
hide evidence of their side’s culpability for the missile’s
firing.
Russian Denial
Ukraine separatists had in their possession “at least”
three Russian-made surface-to-air missile systems, known by
their NATO designation SA-11 Gadfly, Ukraine state security
official Vitaliy Nayda said in Kyiv yesterday. He said that as
part of a cover-up of who fired the missile, three of the
systems were transported back to Russia just hours after the
plane was shot down. Nayda displayed photos which he said showed
them on the road to the Russian border.
Russia has denied it supplies arms to the separatists and
the rebels have denied they fired the missile.
The Gadfly, known locally as the Buk-M, is a radar-guided
weapon that can find a target at a range of 140 miles and reach
altitudes as high as about 72,000 feet, according to the army-technology.com website.
‘Question No. 1’
While Ukraine officials have called for a special cease-fire zone to be honored at the crash site, Ukraine’s Hroisman
said that neither the separatists nor their Russian allies have
provided guarantees for security.
“We are doing our best to get access and to be able to
transport bodies to send them to their homelands after the
necessary examination,” Hroisman told reporters in Kyiv
yesterday. Body transportation “is the question No. 1 for us,”
he said.
The crash, which claimed the lives of all of those aboard
Flight 17 bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, has deepened
Europe’s worst political crisis since the Cold War ended.
President Barack Obama on July 18 said the U.S. had
determined the plane, a Boeing Co. 777, was struck by a missile
fired from territory held by pro-Russian insurgents. Obama, who
has said Russia is behind the arming of the separatists, also
decried what he termed Putin’s refusal to “de-escalate the
situation.”
Merkel-Putin Talk
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Putin spoke by phone
early yesterday and agreed that the International Civil Aviation
Organization, a United Nations specialized agency, should lead
the crash investigation. Both leaders also stressed the
necessity of ending armed clashes in southeastern Ukraine and
starting peace talks, according to a Kremlin statement.
As Ukraine accuses Russia of supplying the missile, Putin
has blamed the Kyiv government, saying the crash wouldn’t have
happened had it not fomented the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The disaster occurred hours after the U.S. and the European
Union imposed further sanctions on Putin.
Sanctions imposed by the U.S. since the Ukraine crisis
began have been more far-reaching than those adopted by the
European Union, though the plane disaster may alter that
disparity.
U.S. Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican who
heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, yesterday broached
his suspicions of a cover-up.
“I think what’s happened is a rather poorly trained
separatist group here probably have inadvertently shot down an
airliner and are now trying to cover this up,” he said on CNN.
“That’s the part you see on the ground.”
FBI Agents
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has dispatched two
agents with training in forensics and crime scenes to Ukraine to
assist in collecting evidence, a U.S. law enforcement official
said. As of yesterday, they were waiting in Kyiv for security
conditions to improve before going to the crash site, the
official said.
An investigator for the U.S. National Transportation Safety
Board who left Washington on July 18 hadn’t made it to the crash
site as of late yesterday, said a person briefed on the matter
who requested anonymity in discussing it.
Malaysia, which is suffering its second plane tragedy in
four months, sent Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai to Kyiv.
“Any action that can prevent us from learning about the truth
of MH17 cannot be tolerated,” he told reporters yesterday at
Kuala Lumpur International Airport, using shorthand for the
plane’s designation.
“Malaysia calls for all parties to protect the integrity
of the crash site and to allow the investigation to proceed,”
Liow said. “Yes, MH17 has become a geopolitical issue. But we
must not forget that it is a human tragedy.”
Australia’s foreign minister will go to New York to seek a
binding UN resolution on an independent probe.
Flight Recorders
At the crash site, OSCE’s Bociurkiw yesterday said his team
was trying to determine the identities of the people moving the
remains and who they represent. He said the jet’s flight data
recorders — known as black boxes — still haven’t been found.
The Ukraine government said rebels have taken at least 38 bodies
to Donetsk, the regional capital.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said today in a
Facebook post that the plane’s flight-data recorders are his
nation’s property.
In Grabovo, a village where much of the plane’s debris is
scattered, reporters found gunmen looking on as rescue workers
gathered bodies.
The gunmen, representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk
People’s Republic, let workers from Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry
set up tents at the scene while limiting access to international
investigators.
Dutch Embassy
At the Dutch embassy in Kyiv, people left thousands of
flowers, candles and toys to remember the travelers from the
Netherlands who died in the crash. The majority of the
passengers — at least 192 — were from the Netherlands,
including a Dutch senator who died with his wife and daughter,
and a University of Amsterdam academic, who worked to bring
cheaper AIDS drugs to Africa.
“I feel very sorry for all these innocent people who were
killed, and for the children,” said Halyna Vituk, 64, as she
broke into tears, dressed all in white and carrying sunflowers
and a candle at the embassy in Kyiv. “Putin should bear all the
responsibility. And of course, the separatists. But they will
not shoot without his order.”
When it was hit, Flight 17 was at about 33,000 feet (10,000
meters), taking a route over Ukraine that several other carriers
have been avoiding. The jet was at an altitude cleared for
commercial traffic, according to navigation agency Eurocontrol.
In March, Malaysian Airline Flight 370 vanished with 239
people on board en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur. It has
yet to be located.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Daryna Krasnolutska in Kyiv at
dkrasnolutsk@bloomberg.net;
Daria Marchak in Kyiv at
dmarchak@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Stanley James at
sjames8@bloomberg.net
Andy Sharp, Subramaniam Sharma