Why isnt anybody coming here to pick up the pieces? The New York Times Fighting Cuts Off Access to Ukraine Air Crash Site By ANDREW E. KRAMER JULY 29, 2014 ROZSYPNE, Ukraine — The sprawling fields of debris where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in eastern Ukraine, leaving a gruesome enough scene as it was, took on new macabre elements on Tuesday as the zone became a front line in the war here. The fighting has driven Russian-backed separatists from part, but not all, of the site, which is about 14 square miles, leaving unclear how or when investigators and an international police force now based in Donetsk would be able to resume collecting evidence and any remaining bodies. Soon after the airliner was shot down on July 17, both the Ukrainian military and separatists vowed to uphold a truce around the debris fields, lest the fighting disrupt the forensic investigation and efforts to retrieve the bodies. Nothing of the sort happened. The fighting that has now roughly bisected the debris zone prevented Dutch and Australian police officers and forensic experts from reaching the area for a third day. The team did not venture out of Donetsk, where artillery shelling was already striking the center of the city. From the moment Flight 17 fell — en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — the wreckage zone has presented Ukrainian officials with a challenge, forcing them to admit that they do not control a major disaster in their own country. While everyone from the Ukrainian president down pledged cooperation, the prospect of a long investigation presented a potential obstacle to Ukraine’s larger goals of retaking Donetsk and defeating the rebels. Had the investigation begun under rebel auspices, it would have left separatists in control of a strategic territory in the larger battle. The Ukrainian Army said it was pressing an offensive to surround Donetsk, the separatist capital, and push insurgents from the crash site, but denied it was fighting in the debris fields, even as a front split the site in two. Bodies or body parts remained there; Dutch officials said that 227 coffins had been flown to the Netherlands, though separatists initially said they had collected bodies and body fragments of all 298 victims. Further muddying the outlook for international investigators to reach the debris zone, the Donetsk People’s Republic, the main rebel group, announced in an emailed statement on Tuesday that theOrganization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was serving the interests of Ukraine and the United States and would be banned from the crash site. But late Tuesday, a senior rebel official called a news conference to deny the rebels had made any such decision. The frustration over Flight 17 has aggravated relations between Russia and the West and played a role in the expanded anti-Russia sanctions announced Tuesday by the European Union and the United States. In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said that he had spoken to his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and that they had agreed on the need to de-escalate the conflict here. But Mr. Kerry also said that Russia was not helping. “We now have clear evidence of artillery and rocket fire from Russia into Ukraine,” he said, adding that the separatists would “continue to fire on Ukrainian forces” unless “they can feel some pressure — something real from their Russian backers.” Separatist fighters were drifting away from the debris area Tuesday afternoon, with a half-dozen glum-looking and exhausted gunmen hunkered down in trenches on the western edge. The men did not bother to venture out to check the documents of people in a car creeping through the area. One of the fighters in a roadside trench, who gave only his nickname, Trojan, said Ukrainian forces now controlled the village of Grabovo, the site of a field where the main landing gear, the wings and the rear cone of the Boeing 777-200’s fuselage hit. Behind him lay a cargo pallet from the flight. “The plane isn’t relevant now,” he said. “We’re being attacked.” This village, where the cockpit fell in a field and pancaked — and where many bodies landed — was still contested on Tuesday, a day when fighting also raged in a half-dozen other cities in eastern Ukraine. Two white, bullet-riddled minivans, the type often commandeered by separatists, sat on the main street here, apparently having fallen into an ambush. Flies buzzed in their bloody interiors, which contained bandages and empty disinfectant bottles. “Don’t go any farther,” said a separatist driving a black Mercedes sedan with bullet holes in its rear window. The Ukrainians were nearby, he said. In Petropavlovka, a village where the overhead luggage bins from the plane’s business-class section landed in a tree, along with much other debris, residents said that shooting had raged through the night into early Tuesday. “Our nerves are totally destroyed,” said Maria Nikolayeva, a retired woman at the village store. She said she was already distraught from finding personal belongings in her garden, including a white-and-blue sandal and a Dutch clog shoe. Of the passengers, 192 were Dutch citizens. “We are afraid all the time,” Ms. Nikolayeva said. “We hear shooting here and there, day and night. We don’t know what happened to the plane. We just want peace. “I want my grandson to sleep at night,” she said. “Why isn’t anybody coming here to pick up the pieces?” In Donetsk on Tuesday, rockets struck near the occupied building of the domestic intelligence agency that has been used as a headquarters of the rebels’ military commander, a Russian citizen who goes by the nickname Igor Strelkov, or Igor the Shooter. Rockets also hit a 10-floor residential building about 500 yards away on Rosa Luxemburg Street, killing a janitor who was standing in the yard. Men wearing rubber gloves gathered the janitor’s scattered remains. Horrified residents stood watching, as the fighting touched the center of a city that before the conflict was a prosperous provincial capital. Ukrainian officials insisted that their forces were not engaged in fighting near the debris site, despite the violence seen there, and they were reluctant to state outright that a mobilization of troops in the area had delayed the crash investigation. But it was clear from statements by officials in Kiev that they wanted government forces to take control of the wreckage site before investigators began their work. On Tuesday, fresh tracks from what residents said were Ukrainian armored vehicles dented the pavement in Mikhailovka, a village about nine miles from the crash site and well within a supposed 24-mile cease-fire perimeter Volodymyr Groysman, a deputy prime minister leading the government’s response to the downing of the jetliner, said that the territory would be brought under government control by Thursday at the latest. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said that the area was of no strategic value and that the government expected rebels to flee as the Ukrainian military reclaimed nearby territory. “As soon as the territory is liberated and secured,” Mr. Lysenko said at a briefing Tuesday, “the international experts will have full access.” The Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, suggested at a briefing on Monday that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had secured access to the wreckage site in negotiations with rebels. But repeated efforts by members of the international task force to reach the site were unsuccessful. The United States accuses militants of shooting down the airliner with a powerful air defense missile supplied by Russia. The separatists and Russia deny any role in the downing. Also on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that Russia continued to intervene in the fighting on behalf of the insurgents and to build up a military presence on its side of the border. They said that Russian military aircraft had violated Ukrainian airspace and that Ukrainian border posts had come under mortar fire and other attacks from the Russian side of the border. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:15:32 +0000
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