© Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty ImagesDamning evidence that Donetsk rebels are tampering with evidence at the MH17 crash site!
Comment: How charming. And yet the MSM continues to berate the rebels and the Russians, who have been fully supportive of a peaceful, intensive, international investigation.
In Washington, President Obama demanded Monday that Russia use its influence to compel pro-Russian separatists to allow the investigators full access to the victims and the crash site.
Comment: Donetsk's leaders have publicly stated their total willingness to provide international investigators security and access.
Noting that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has declared a demilitarized zone around the crash site near the Russian border, Obama said the rebels who control the area are continuing to block an investigation, are removing evidence from the scene and are mishandling the remains of passengers and crew among the 298 people who were killed when the plane was shot down Thursday over eastern Ukraine.
Comment: Obama lies and continues to make unsubstantiated statements regarding what's going on in Donetsk. The rebels have done all they can to secure the site until investigators arrived, which they took their sweet time doing. They complied with OSCE requests to secure the crash site and scattered remains as well as they could. Keep in mind that it is a war zone, they lack the resources, and again, the investigators took days to arrive.
The burden is now on Russia and President Vladimir Putin to insist that the separatists "stop tampering with the evidence" and grant immediate, full and unimpeded access to the crash site, Obama told reporters outside the White House. He said the United States would raise this issue Monday at the United Nations.
Comment: No, the burden is on the U.S. and Obama to stop lying and using this event for propaganda purposes.
In central Donetsk, explosions and artillery fire could be heard from the direction of the city's train station and airport, and a spokesman for the pro-Russian rebels said there was also fighting near the central market. Portions of the city 40 miles from the crash site were closed off.
"This is a planned offensive," said a Ukrainian military spokesman, Vladislav Seleznev. The military is trying to push rebels away from the airport, he said. "Aviation and artillery are not aiming at civilian residences. Their only aim is to block the terrorists and fighters."
Comment: Psychopathic doublespeak. The Ukrainians consider the civilians terrorists, ergo, they are targeting civilians.
In an interview on CNN, Poroshenko said 16 bodies are still missing from the 298 killed in the crash. He said the rest are on refrigerated train cars that are supposed to depart the rebel-held town of Torez at 7 p.m. local time under international supervision.
Comment: Unfortunately, this is understandable, as several bodies were reportedly torn up before or during impact.
At the same time, Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk continued to build a case being made by Washington and Kiev that pro-Moscow separatists and Russian forces worked hand in hand in acquiring and operating the missile battery believed to have been used to shoot down the jetliner Thursday. He said the rebels alone did not have the technical ability to operate such sophisticated equipment. He implicated Russia in aiding them and called for an international investigation to establish the facts.
"Drunken guerrillas cannot manage this system," Yatsenyuk told reporters Monday in Kiev. "They need to work in cooperation with another radar system that we don't have in Ukrainian territory, and we want an international investigation to get the real facts of who targeted" the flight.
Comment: No, the rebels could not have managed this. But Kiev could have, or the U.S., or Israel.
Obama said foreign leaders he has called in recent days were "in state of shock, but also frankly in a state of outrage" over the shootdown and its aftermath. Teams of international investigators "need to be able to conduct a prompt and full and unimpeded, as well as a transparent, investigation," he said.
Rebel actions to block full access and remove evidence raise the question, "what are they trying to hide," Obama said.
Comment: At no point have the rebels blocked access to investigators: they only arrived Monday morning! The OSCE who were already there were there as observers, not investigators, and were granted limited access. This was before Poroshenko announced a 40-km DMZ around the site.
In the rundown mining town of Torez, three Dutch forensics experts reached a train station Monday where the bodies of Flight 17 victims were being stored in refrigerated rail cars. Accompanied by an observation team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation, the experts later visited the crash site just south of the eastern Ukrainian town of Hrabove about 25 miles west of the Russian border.
Before and after the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17
Yatsenyuk said 31 international experts, including two from the United States, have landed in Kharkiv. The government was working to establish a safe humanitarian corridor to take them through rebel-held territory.
He declined to comment on whether the government had launched a fresh offensive to retake Donetsk.
Amid growing international outrage, diplomats pressed the United Nations Security Council to vote Monday on a resolution demanding that pro-Russian separatists grant unfettered access to the crash site in eastern Ukraine as the rebels continued to hinder officials on the ground seeking to secure the bodies of the 298 victims.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott echoed growing outrage over rebel actions to limit access to the site and their mishandling of bodies. He called on Russia, which has a veto at the Security Council, not to block the motion being proposed by his nation.
"There is no doubt that at the moment the site is under the control of the Russian-backed rebels," Abbott told reporters in Canberra. He said the situation at present was tantamount to "leaving criminals in control of the crime scene."
Comment: Abbott is putting the cart before the horse.
Late Sunday, a Ukrainian committee said limited teams of rescuers had found 251 bodies and 86 fragments of bodies, which were loaded onto two trains, according to Reuters news agency. But the trains were being held at a railway station in the town of Torez by rebels who were refusing to let it leave.
International observers from the Netherlands and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Monday visited refrigerated train cars at the Torez station where the bodies were being kept. The observers were under heavily armed guard.
Michael Bociurkiw, an OSCE spokesman, said it remained unclear when the rail cars containing the bodies would move and where they would go. He said renewed fighting in Donetsk on Monday had possibly damaged the tracks, adding a possible new complication.
"We were told by rebels it has caused some damage to railway system," he said of the latest fighting. "That is a crucial development in the sense that with the airport inoperable, and if the train station is inoperable, that will cut off Donetsk even further."
Comment: All signs point to Kiev being the ones actively hindering the success of an international investigation. Yet were is the international condemnation for their actions?
In a video statement issued early Monday, Putin said some local and emergency workers had been allowed onto the crash site, but he conceded that "this is not sufficient" and called for the establishment of a safe, humanitarian corridor for investigators. He called for renewed dialogue to restore peace in region, yet he also seemed to push back against the global accusations implicating rebels.
"At the same time, no one should and has the right to use this tragedy to achieve their own political goals," Putin said.
Perhaps suggesting a slight backtracking, Putin stopped short in his statement of once again tactically blaming the Ukrainian government, as Russian officials have largely done in the wake of the crash. Instead, he seemed to blame the resumption of fighting after a cease-fire ended late last month.
"I am confident this tragedy would definitely not have happened if the hostilities had not resumed in eastern Ukraine on June 28," he said.
European leaders - who have thus far imposed limited sanctions on Russia - continued to threatened far tougher action if Putin did not up the pressure on the rebels to cooperate. After a coordination of efforts between the leaders of Germany, Britain and France, foreign ministers from the European Union were set to meet on Tuesday to decide on fresh steps.
Any move to enact truly sweeping sanctions could bring a swift response from Moscow. Thus far, European nations have been leery of taking tough steps, due in part to their lucrative economic ties to Russia. On Monday, George Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer - or treasury secretary - told the BBC that London was ready to take an economic hit because doing nothing would be worse.
"Sanctions will have an economic impact, and we are prepared to undertake further sanctions," Osborne said. He said that the effect of "allowing international borders to be ignored, of allowing airlines to be shot down - that's a much greater economic hit for Britain, and we're not prepared to allow that to happen."
A rebel leader, Andriy Purgin, told Russia's Interfax news service on Monday that separatist groups would arrange for the bodies to be sent to Kharkiv.
But he dismissed international calls to move toward a peaceful settlement of the conflict in eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of the tragedy.
"A cease-fire is out of the question for now,"Purgin told Interfax, citing active clashes around the region. He also accused the Ukrainian military of conducting flybys - though not firing on rebels - at the crash site.
Rebels, meanwhile, said they have "finished" their search-and-rescue operation, finding 282 bodies and 87 "fragments" belonging to the other 16.
Purgin also has denied the allegations that separatists are being supplied with military hardware from Russia. "I have not seen this hardware," he said. "Not one of the 150 items that are being attributed to us. Had we had this hardware, the military situation would have been completely different."
For their part, Russian officials appeared to launch a counteroffensive Monday against the mounting evidence being cited by the United States and Ukraine.
Speaking on Russian television, Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartopolov, head of the main operative directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, denied that Russia had supplied advanced antiaircraft systems to the separatists in Ukraine. He then produced several photographs, including one allegedly taken on July 17, which he claimed showed a Ukrainian military Buk antiaircraft battery in the vicinity of the village of Zarochynske, about 30 miles east of Donetsk, on the morning of the crash.
He also claimed that a Sukhoi Su-25 Ukrainian fighter jet ascended in the direction of the ill-fated jetliner and came to within two to three miles of Flight 17. Kartopolov added that the jetliner had diverted from its established flight path by more than eight miles and was moving to correct its course before the crash. He suggested that the diversion was tied to Ukrainian air traffic control but said the plane's black boxes needed to be analyzed to establish the facts.
He also demanded the release of U.S. satellite images of the area at the time of the crash.
Comment: Good luck!
"According to the statements of U.S. representatives, they have satellite pictures confirming that the [missile] launched toward the Malaysian plane was carried out by militia. But no one has seen these pictures," Kartopolov said.
In eastern Ukraine, meanwhile, a Dutch military plane carrying coffins arrived Monday in the provincial capital of Kharkiv in preparation for the transfer and removal of the bodies.
Kharkiv, which is about 180 miles northwest of Donetsk, is emerging as a regional center to coordinate the repatriation of the passengers' remains and to investigate the crash.
Local officials said four agents from Interpol and Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency, also arrived Monday. An international coordinating delegation, primarily from the Netherlands along with a few Germans, held a brief news conference in which they announced their presence and said they have work to do without answering more specific questions. The Dutch plane carrying the coffins also brought seven forensics experts to Ukraine, according to the Kharkiv regional government.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko said he had ordered his government to assist in the "immediate return of the bodies home." A spokesman for his cabinet said a total of 282 bodies had been located by Monday afternoon, along with 87 body fragments.
There were no indications that Kharkiv would serve as anything more than a transit point for the bodies en route to the Netherlands. Local officials said, however, that they were ordered by the government to prepare for any family members who want to be in Kharkiv as their loved ones make their final journey home.
Nataliya Drozd, a spokeswoman for the government's crisis center, said they have lined up more than 400 rooms in 10 hotels for relatives and located three empty factory warehouses where airplane parts could be collected and stored.
They also are staffing a small call center that relatives can telephone to find hotels or get contacts for any of the international groups involved in the investigation. But since the call center started Saturday, the only queries have come from Ukrainians volunteering to act as interpreters and psychological counselors, and from reporters, said Marina Kravchenko, an English-language schoolteacher who volunteered to answer the phones that rang only once in about half an hour.
"So far not a single family member has come to Kharkiv," Drozd said. "It's not sure if the bodies will come here."
Faiola reported from Berlin. William Branigin in Washington, Carol Morello in Kharkiv, Natasha Abbakumova and Karoun Demirjian in Moscow and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.
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