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Ukraine Separatists Release Bodies and Black Boxes
Ukraine Separatists Release Bodies and Black Boxes
(about 2 hours later)
KIEV, Ukraine — After days of obstruction, Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine reached an agreement with Malaysia on Monday, surrendering the flight recorder boxes of the Malaysia Airlines jetliner downed by a surface-to-air missile last week, and allowing the bodies of the victims to be evacuated by train.
MOSCOW — Russia presented a combination of conciliation and bluster on Monday over its handling of the downed Malaysia Airlines jet, with President Vladimir V. Putin seemingly probing for a way out of the crisis without appearing to compromise with the West.
The agreement, announced by the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, in a live television broadcast, appeared to represent a significant movement to end the standoff after the crash of Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which killed 298 people. The bodies lay for days in a wheat field in eastern Ukraine, an area controlled by the separatists.
On one hand, he offered conciliatory words in a video statement, oddly released in the middle of the night, while the separatists allied with Moscow in southeastern Ukraine released the bodies of the victims and turned over the black box flight recorders from the doomed aircraft to Malaysian officials.
The refusal of the separatists to permit unfettered access to the crash site has further raised suspicions that they may have been responsible for the missile strike. The obstruction has also generated enormous international criticism of the Ukrainian separatists and of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
However, two senior military officers forcefully demanded that the United States show publicly any proof that rebels fired the fatal missile, and again suggested that the Ukrainian military shot down the Malaysia Airlines jet despite the fact that Ukraine has not used antiaircraft weapons in the fight along its eastern border.
Mr. Najib, speaking from Kuala Lumpur, said the agreement with Alexander Borodai, a commander of the separatist forces in the city of Donetsk, Ukraine, called for the bodies to be taken by train to Kharkiv, a city held by the Ukrainian government. Six Malaysian representatives were to oversee the transfer of the bodies in Kharkiv to the custody of the Netherlands.
Mr. Putin seemed to respond to the outraged international demands growing daily that he intervene personally to rein in the rebels — particularly to halt the degrading chaos surrounding the recovery of the remains. But at the same time, Moscow did not concede that it was at fault.
The so-called black boxes were handed over in Donetsk, as well.
“Putin is trying to find his own variation of a twin-track decision, because he does not have a clear exit,” said Gleb O. Pavlovsky, a political consultant who once worked for the Kremlin.
The agreement appeared to be a diplomatic success for Mr. Najib, whose government has been reluctant to cast blame for the airline disaster, the second Malaysia has faced in the past four months.
The pressure continued to expand. President Obama delivered yet another personal rebuke to Mr. Putin from the White House lawn over the intransigence of the rebels toward the international investigation, hours before they agreed to more cooperation. In addition, an initial expert analysis of photographs of the airplane’s fuselage found that the damage was consistent with being struck by the type of missile that U.S. officials said was used.
Mr. Putin was confronting the threat of new European Union sanctions and new admonishments by President Obama, as suspicions grew that the separatists had downed the plane with a Russian antiaircraft weapon. Mr. Putin and Russian military officials continued to deny that they had anything to do with the disaster and suggested that some of the purported evidence had been fabricated by Ukraine and its Western backers.
On Tuesday, Russia faces the threat of far more serious sanctions from its main trading partners in Western Europe.
Mr. Obama, in a televised statement from the White House, said that despite the advances on Monday, the Ukraine separatists continued to obstruct international investigators and that relatives of the 298 victims were in a “state of shock and outrage” over the delays so far in recovering the bodies. Mr. Obama said Russia would only “further isolate itself” if it did not act more assertively to rein in the separatists.
“Of course this is a strong blow to him, a strong blow to his strategy,” said Mr. Pavlovsky, referring to the fact that Russian separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine have been discredited globally, due to suspicions that they shot down the aircraft and their handling of the crash site.
At a news briefing in Kiev late Monday afternoon, Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who is leading the Ukrainian government’s response to the jetliner downing, said a train carrying bodies in four refrigerated rail cars from the town of Torez would go to Kharkiv, in northeast Ukraine, outside the rebel-held area. The train departed at 7 p.m. local time for a journey that was expected to take hours.
“It touches him too,” Mr. Pavlovsky said, “He wants to get out, but to get out without having lost.”
More than half the victims of the Amsterdam-to-Kuala Lumpur flight were Dutch, and the others came from more than half a dozen countries.
Mr. Obama called for Mr. Putin to “pivot away” from the rebels, linking him directly to their abuse of the crash site.
Mr. Groysman said that 282 bodies had been found and loaded onto the train, as well as dozens of body parts from as many as 16 other victims, suggesting that officials believed they had recovered most of the remains of the passengers and crew from the Boeing 777. He said that from Kharkiv, the bodies would be flown to Amsterdam, where they would be taken to a laboratory with the latest forensic technology.
“Russia, and President Putin in particular, has direct responsibility to compel them to cooperate with the investigation,” he said in brief remarks. “President Putin says that he supports a full and fair investigation and I appreciate those words, but they have to be supported by actions.”
European leaders threatened new sanctions on Russia as soon as Tuesday, suggesting they were increasingly open to the harder line being taken against Moscow by the United States, which has accused Russia of providing the surface-to-air missile system that brought down the jetliner, training rebels how to use it, and perhaps even supplying experts who helped fire it.
Mr. Putin’s statement was issued on the Kremlin website at 1:40 a.m. Monday on video, with analysts suggesting the timing was aimed more at Washington than Russia.
Mr. Putin issued a brief statement early on Monday saying that Russia would work to ensure that the conflict in eastern Ukraine moved from the battlefield to the negotiating table. He said that a robust international investigating team must have secure access to the crash site, but also accused unspecified nations of exploiting the disaster in pursuit of “mercenary political goals.”
His usual swagger seemed absent; instead he looked pasty and unsure, avoiding talking into the camera directly and leaning on a desk.
The Dutch forensic experts, who inspected some of the bodies before they left on the train, were accompanied by representatives of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The O.S.C.E. representatives have been conducting an international monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine and had quickly sent observers to the plane wreckage site, where they said their efforts were limited by rebels until Sunday, when they were granted broader access.
The statement did not break new ground, either. The Russian leader repeated his support for a thorough international investigation, and said Russia would pursue its efforts to move the fight over the future of southeastern Ukraine from the battlefield to the negotiating table. Mr. Putin did not address directly any accusations of Russian complicity in downing the aircraft.
As the experts began their work, heavy fighting, including mortar shelling, was underway between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian military, in the nearby regional capital of Donetsk, a rebel stronghold about 50 miles from the crash site. A spokesman for the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic, Sergei Vladimirovich, said that the government forces had begun pushing into the city from the northwest, near a market by the main train station, and a witness reported seeing heavy shelling in the area, including damage at a children’s hospital.
By the end of the day there was one small diplomatic victory. The Malaysian government dealt directly with the leadership of the Russian-supported Donetsk People’s Republic, the breakaway faction in southeastern Ukraine, in negotiating the release of the bodies and the flight recorders.
With fighting still raging and access to the crash site still difficult, European leaders maneuvered to overcome longstanding divisions about imposing significantly tighter sanctions against Moscow.
Amidst all the negotiating, the Ukrainian government pressed its attack on Donetsk, firing on rebel positions in the northwest of the city and killing at least three civilians. Ukraine denied that it hit civilian areas, but heavy damage in the city cast doubt on that assertion.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, whose country bore the brunt of the casualties, told Parliament that “all political, economic and financial options” were available as the European Union prepared to debate measures further isolating the Russian leader.
In his statement, Mr. Putin also warned that he was suspicious of all the criticism directed at the Kremlin. “No one should and no one has the right to use this tragedy to pursue their own political goals,” he said.
“It is clear that Russia must use her influence on the separatists to improve the situation on the ground,” Mr. Rutte said, according to Reuters. “If in the coming days access to the disaster area remains inadequate, then all political, economic and financial options are on the table against those who are directly or indirectly responsible for that.”
Mr. Putin often seethes with distrust and anger that the United States seeks to exploit any opening to weaken Russia, a widespread sentiment in Russia reflected in his high approval ratings. The entire Ukraine confrontation is rooted in his determination to stop the West from wrestling Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit.
His words found an echo from George Osborne, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, who said Britain was prepared to tighten sanctions even if that meant losing Russian business in London’s economically vital financial services industry. “Any sanctions will have an economic impact, and we are prepared to undertake further sanctions,” he said in a BBC radio interview.
Russians, too, exhibited a certain defensive anger about the current accusations, convinced that the West leapt to condemn them no matter what the issue.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said he told Mr. Putin in a telephone conversation on Sunday that the world expects Russia to use its influence on the separatists to open up the crash site.
Anastasia Lukina, 30, a sales manager in Moscow, said either side might have shot down the plane. “So the West says it wants a full investigation, but they’ve already accused us of killing those people?” she said. “We all know what the conclusion to that investigation will be. So why even bother pretending? Russia is the world’s scapegoat.”
His remarks followed a telephone conversation over the weekend between the leaders of Britain, France and Germany, who were reported to have agreed that their countries should be ready to use a meeting of the 28-nation European Union’s foreign ministers on Tuesday to introduce tougher sanctions. The comments also came a day after the American secretary of state, John Kerry, said he was warning Mr. Putin “for the last time” to stabilize eastern Ukraine and halt the flow of weapons to separatists there. He called their handling of the victims’ remains, which the rebels seized from Ukrainian rescue workers, “grotesque.”
That is the theme of much of coverage on state-run television, which has also aired all manner of theories lifted from the dark corners of the Web.
At the United Nations, the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution on Monday that “condemns in the strongest terms” the attack that brought down the Malaysian plane, called for an international investigation with the United Nations civil aviation agency and demanded that armed groups at the crash site allow unfettered access. But the resolution carries no threat of enforcement if there is noncompliance.
One such theory holds that whoever shot down the plane was actually gunning for Mr. Putin, whose plane was over eastern Europe at the time, returning from Latin America, for example.
Mr. Putin’s statement did not directly address the allegations that Russia had supplied the weapon system and expertise needed to shoot down the plane. “Russia will do everything it can to shift the conflict in eastern Ukraine from today’s military stage to the stage of discussion at the negotiating table,” Mr. Putin said in video statement posted at 1:40 a.m. on Monday, suggesting it emerged from a late-night discussion.
Another argues that the bodies were actually from the Malaysian Airways jet that disappeared six months ago — dumped only now to make the separatists look bad.
Later on Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry said at a briefing that images that purported to show a surface-to-air missile system being driven toward Russia after the downing of the plane were fake, Interfax reported. The Defense Ministry also said that an American satellite was flying over eastern Ukraine at the time of the crash, Interfax reported, and it asked Washington to release the satellite imagery.
“In Russia, no one thinks that Russia is guilty,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who specializes in studying Russia’s political elite.
The Dutch king, Willem-Alexander, addressed the nation in a televised speech on Monday, a first since Flight 17 was shot down. Both he and Mr. Rutte, the prime minister, had faced criticism for not reaching out to victims; others said, however, that a slow, detached response is ordinary in Dutch culture.
The Kremlin actually spent months using state-run television to build the case that the Kiev government are a pack of “fascists,” bent on killing the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. It has softened that message somewhat in recent weeks, but not abandoned it.
The king said that the scar from the disaster “will remain and be felt for many years to come.” Mr. Rutte, who had been photographed on Sunday wearing shorts, on Monday wore a black suit as a sign of mourning as he, the king, and other members of his cabinet met with about 1,000 family members, relatives and friends of victims in the city of Nieuwegein.
Hence two senior Russian military commanders, sitting in a vast briefing room and dwarfed by the giant electronic screens overhead, used various satellite images and charts to raise a series of rhetorical questions that suggested that Ukraine and the United States deliberately plotted to shoot down the passenger jet. The unusual bilingual briefing was broadcast live on state-run television.
On a day of swirling diplomatic developments, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine, in an interview with CNN, called on the United States Congress to designate as terrorist organizations the separatist groups in eastern Ukraine. He also said that if economic sanctions against Russia fail, Ukraine may seek new status as a special non-NATO ally of the United States — a designation held by Israel, Australia and the Philippines.
“According to U.S. declarations, they have satellite images that confirm that the missile was launched by the rebels, said Lt. Gen. Andrei Kartopolov, of the Russian General Staff. “But nobody has seen these images.”
“It will be an important gesture of solidarity that we are expecting from the entire world,” Mr. Poroshenko said. The rebellion in Russia’s east, he said, “is a threat to the whole world.”
He called for them to be released, hinting that they were taken by an experimental military satellite that was orbiting over eastern Ukraine on Thursday because Washington knew what it would photograph.
Among other accusations, the Russians said a Ukrainian Sukhoi-25 fighter jet that was airborne at the time briefly approached the same 33,000-feet altitude as the Boeing 777 and was within range to bring it down with an air-to-air missile.
As for Russia, it had nothing to do with the arming the militiamen, General Kartopolov said. “I would like to emphasize that the Russian Federation did not deliver to the militiamen Buk antiaircraft missile systems, nor any other types of weapons or military equipment,” he said.
Ultimately, Russian policy might actually tilt according to what emerges from the investigation. If there is even a hint of doubt, Moscow might cling to both its support for the rebels and claims of its own virtue, analysts suggested.
“If there is not 100 percent proof, then Russia will continue to say” that they are not at fault, said Alexei V. Makarkin, an analyst at the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “If there is 95 or even 99 percent, then Russia will not agree with it. They can continue to support the insurgents in the east.”
