Posts
Kiev ends ceasefire at MH17 crash site, West blocks Moscow’s UN plea to reinstate it
Kiev has suspended a ceasefire with the self-defense forces at the site of the Malaysian Airlines plane crash in eastern Ukraine, after the international recovery team searching for victims halted their efforts over security concerns
8 August, 2014
The
fighting is now feared to escalate as Kiev seeks to regain control
over the area largely controlled by militia.
"The
ceasefire in the plane crash zone, announced by the President of
Ukraine at the request of international experts, which has been
thoroughly observed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, will not be in
place at the beginning of the second phase of the investigation,"
the Ukrainian government said in a statement on Thursday.
This
comes after The Netherlands, who lead the international probe,
announced it was halting the mission to recover victims and debris of
the July 17 MH17 crash because of fighting between Ukrainian forces
and rebels in the area.
Prime
Minister Mark Rutte said that the risk posed to the team of
Australian, Dutch and Malaysian experts working in the area was too
great to continue the operation under current conditions.
“The
security situation in eastern Ukraine and the MH17 crash site has
worsened by the day,”
Rutte told journalists in The Hague, as cited by Reuters. “That
is making it impossible for experts to do their work.”
Experts
will resume their efforts once the situation allows, Dutch Foreign
Minister Frans Timmermans wrote on his Facebook page, reported RIA
Novosti.
The
suspension of the ceasefire in the MH17 crash area is a direct
violation of the UN resolution, Russia's UN envoy, Vitaly Churkin,
told reporters on Thursday.
“The
truce was approved by the UN Security Council resolution 2166, thus
it is a clear violation of the resolution and will have very serious
consequences for international inspectors' abilities to conduct the
investigation when they decide to return to the area,” Churkin
said.
Russia’s
efforts at the UN to reinstate the ceasefire at the crash site were
blocked by Western states.
“It
was blocked the usual way,” Churkin
said, adding that Lithuania, the US, and Australia began proposing
inappropriate amendments to the text.
Meanwhile,
Kiev officials put the blame for the situation on the self-defense
troops.
A
Ukrainian defense spokesman said earlier the Army was not carrying
out any military action within 20 km (12 miles) of the plane crash
site, according to Reuters.
The
government claims that the international mission has been halted
because of “terrorists’
provocations”
who “posed
threats to the lives”
of the recovery mission members.
A car of the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is seen at a checkpoint controlled
by the Ukrainian army near the town of Debaltseve, Donetsk Region
August 6, 2014.(Reuters / Valentyn Ogirenko)
The
international investigating team arrived at
the site days after the tragic incident due to security reasons.
The
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has been
actively assisting efforst to provide the experts’ safety as they
collected human remains and victims’ personal belongings.
We're pleased to have played such a key role so far in #MH17 recovery efforts - facilitating access for the multi-national recovery effort.
The
decision to suspend the operation “must
have been very difficult”
particularly given that experts hadwaited “a
long time to finally go to the site”
and spent only “a
few short days there,”
Michael Bociurkiw, a spokesman for the OSCE Special Monitoring
Mission to Ukraine told ABC News. But over the past two or three days
the situation has become untenable as “there
was live fire”
and “yesterday
[there was] shooting very close by the experts.”
Answering
to the question on whether it was the rebel troops who were to blame
for the situation, Bociurkiw said “we
were unable to establish where the fire or shelling actually came
from.”
“We
are not pointing fingers - that is not our job. But we are very, very
disappointed that the behavior caused suspension of the mission,”
he said.
A
lot more work remains to be done in the investigation of the tragedy,
but the question now is “what
will actually happen to this debris lying out there in the field
unguarded,”
the OSCE spokesperson said.
“The
worst possible scenario is for that crash site, that big crime scene
to be caught in the middle of [fighting],”
he believes.
In
July, The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution
calling for an international investigation into the MH17 incident and
demanded safe access to the site for investigators.
Ukrainian
President Petro Poroshenko announced a unilateral ceasefire in a
20-kilometer (12.4-mile) area around the site of the crash. However,
shelling and fighting in the area has continued, hampering the
experts' work several times in the past weeks.
Currently,
at least three areas containing the Boeing-777’s debris remain
unexamined by the international mission, according to the Ukrainian
government. The majority of experts will leave Ukraine until a
decision on resuming the operation is made, it said in a statement.
OSCE monitors on site of #mh17 w/100+ experts from NL, Australia, Malaysia. Today work in/near Rassypnoye
9:28 PM - 6 Aug 2014 Ukraine, Ukraine
Members of a group of international experts inspect wreckage at the site where the downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed, near the village of Hrabove (Grabovo) in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine August 1, 2014.(Reuters / Sergei Karpukhin
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.