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Obama Points to Pro-Russia Separatists in Downing of Malaysia Airlines Plane U.S. Says a Missile Made by Russians Shot Down Plane
(about 4 hours later)
WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that the United States believed the Malaysia Airlines jetliner felled over eastern Ukraine had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile from an area inside Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed separatists. He demanded a prompt international inquiry as signs emerged that separatists were impeding an assessment of the crash site by outside monitors. WASHINGTON — The United States government has concluded that the passenger jet felled over Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory and most likely provided by Russia to pro-Moscow separatists, officials said on Friday.
Mr. Obama’s remarks at the White House were the strongest public suggestions yet from the United States of who was responsible for the downing of the plane, which exploded, crashed and burned on Thursday on farmland in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard. While American officials are still investigating the chain of events leading to the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday, they pointed to a series of indicators of Russian involvement. Among other things, military and intelligence officials said there was mounting evidence that a Ukrainian military plane shot down just three days earlier had been fired upon from inside Russian territory by the same sort of missile battery used to bring down the civilian jet.
Mr. Obama said the loss of life was an “outrage of unspeakable proportions” and a “global tragedy.” He vowed to investigate exactly what had happened to end the lives of “men, women, children, infants who had nothing to do with the crisis” in the region. He also said that at least one American was among the dead. The intelligence persuaded President Obama to publicly lay responsibility at least indirectly at the door of the Kremlin. Speaking at the White House, he tried to channel international indignation toward Russia for what he called an “outrage of unspeakable proportions.” Mr. Obama said the episode should be “a wake-up call for Europe” and “should snap everybody’s heads to attention” about what is going on in Ukraine, where a pro-Russia insurgency has become an international crisis.
“We are going to make sure the truth is out,” Mr. Obama said, referring to what he described as a trove of misinformation that had already shrouded the plane crash. Without going into detail about the intelligence he had been shown, Mr. Obama said that the separatists had been armed and trained “because of Russian support.” High-flying aircraft cannot be shot down without sophisticated equipment and training, he added, “and that is coming from Russia.”
“We don’t have time for propaganda,” he said. “We don’t have time for games.” He singled out President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, accusing him of waging a proxy war that led to the tragedy. “He has the most control over that situation,” Mr. Obama said, “and so far, at least, he has not exercised it.”
The president said the violence in the region must not obstruct an independent investigation of the plane’s destruction, and he called on Russia, Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatists to agree to an immediate cease-fire. “Evidence must not be tampered with,” Mr. Obama said. “Investigators need to access the crash site. And the solemn task of returning those who were lost onboard the plane to their loved ones needs to go forward immediately.” Russia denied involvement and suggested that Ukraine’s military might have been responsible, an assertion Ukraine rejected. Mr. Putin called for talks, saying: “All sides to the conflict must swiftly halt fighting and begin peace negotiations. It is with great concern and sadness that we are watching what is happening in eastern Ukraine. It’s awful; it’s a tragedy.”
While separatists guarding the crash site allowed some Ukrainian government rescue teams to enter and begin collecting bodies, they were less cooperative with a team of monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe who wanted to secure a safe route for the investigation and salvaging operations. As investigators tried to sort out control of the crash site in the middle of a war zone and families mourned the victims, the global revulsion at the downing of the plane grew, particularly with the news that a number of AIDS researchers were among the dead. European leaders joined Mr. Obama in calling for an international investigation unimpeded by combatants and talked about further steps against Moscow, including curbing arms sales.
Reuters quoted Thomas Greminger, chairman of the O.S.C.E.'s permanent council in Vienna, as saying that armed separatists had prevented the monitors from gaining full access to the site. “In the current circumstances, they were not able to help securing this corridor that would allow access for those that would want to investigate,” he was quoted as saying. While separatists guarding the crash site allowed some Ukrainian government rescue teams to enter and begin collecting bodies on Friday, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said the armed rebels had prevented its monitors from gaining full access to the site in order to secure a safe route for the investigation and salvaging operations.
There were reports that some separatists had fired at the monitors, but the O.S.C.E. said in a Twitter message that those claims were untrue. One rebel even fired into the air as the monitors were leaving, according to a spokesman for the organization, Michael Bociurkiw, who was there. Mr. Bociurkiw said bodies in the field were beginning to bloat. A separatist leader said that the governments of the Netherlands and Malaysia had asked the rebels informally not to disturb the crime scene, but that there were not enough refrigerators to keep the bodies there.
Mr. Obama spoke after Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, told an emergency Security Council meeting on the Ukraine conflict that there was “credible evidence” that pro-Russia separatists and their Russian associates in eastern Ukraine were responsible for the crash. Among the 298 people who died when the plane came down was Quinn Lucas Schansman, 19, who was born in New York to a Dutch father and had dual American and Dutch citizenship. Mr. Schansman had been studying in Amsterdam when he decided to fly to Indonesia, where his family was on a three-week vacation. “He was headed over there to meet them,” said Katinka Wallace, a relative.
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 — Flight 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia — was at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet on a commonly used air route over eastern Ukraine when it was struck on Thursday. Mr. Schansman’s Facebook page indicated that he had moved to Amsterdam on April 24 and had been in a relationship with a young woman since last year. His favorite quotation was “I have a dream!” On Friday, friends and relatives posted remembrances in Dutch. “Dear cousin and friend, we’re going to miss you,” one wrote.
Both Russia and the separatist groups deny any responsibility, and some rebel leaders suggest that Ukraine’s armed forces may have shot down the plane. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has implicitly blamed Ukraine’s government, saying it created the conditions for the separatist uprising that has escalated into a major crisis. But Mr. Putin has not denied that a Russian-made weapon may have destroyed the aircraft. American intelligence agencies concluded that the Boeing 777-200 was struck by a Russian-made SA-11 missile fired from a rebel-controlled area near the border in Ukraine. American analysts were focused on an area near the small towns of Snizhne and Torez, about midway between the rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Mr. Obama resisted blaming Mr. Putin personally, saying that the United States did not know who had fired the missile. But he made clear that he held the Russians responsible for failing to stop the violence that made the downing possible. Their determination was based on an analysis of the launch plume and trajectory of the missile, as detected by an American military spy satellite. But the analysis did not pinpoint the origin of the missile launch or identify who launched it. “Those are the million-dollar questions,” said a senior Pentagon official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss details of the analysis.
“We know that they are heavily armed and they are trained,” Mr. Obama said. “That is not an accident. That is happening because of Russian support.” He said it was “not possible for these separatists to be functioning the way they are” without Russian support. Though the separatists claimed to have captured a Ukrainian SA-11 battery in late June, a senior American official said the system was not believed to be operational. “We have high confidence that it was not a Ukrainian system,” the official said of the battery that shot down the Malaysian plane. “We have reason to suspect that it could be a Russian-supplied system.”
He said that the loss of the plane was a direct result of the fighting in the region, and that the violence had been “facilitated in large part because of Russian support.” The downing of the Ukrainian military transport plane on Monday figured prominently in the evaluations. Western officials said there were strong indications that the missile that struck that plane, an Antonov-26, came from the Russian side of the border, although the episode is still under investigation.
Mr. Obama said Mr. Putin could decide not to allow heavy armaments or troops to flow across the border from Russia into Ukraine. If Mr. Putin does that, he said, “then it will stop.” It was not clear whether the same missile battery had brought down the Malaysian aircraft on Thursday but officials said that, either way, they believed the unit had been transported over the border from Russia in recent days. The Ukrainian government released audio in which separatist rebels seemed to be discussing an SA-11 missile system that was moved into eastern Ukraine from Russia just before the Malaysian plane was destroyed.
In her remarks at the United Nations, Ms. Power said, “We assess Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 carrying these 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was likely downed by a surface-to-air missile, an SA-11, operated from a separatist-held location in eastern Ukraine.” She said the United States could not “rule out technical assistance by Russian personnel” in operating the system. American officials said that while they had not authenticated the tape, they had no reason to doubt it, and noted that the accents of the speakers and the scenario described seemed to fit existing information.
Asked later to respond to the American accusations of Russian support, Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s United Nations ambassador, declined to comment. In recent months, Russians have funneled tanks, rockets, artillery and antiaircraft weapons to the separatists, according to American and European officials. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the top NATO commander, warned last month that the Russians had trained separatists to operate some of the heavy weaponry, although he did not mention SA-11 missiles specifically.
The 15-member Security Council called unanimously for a “full, thorough and independent international investigation” into the cause of the crash. Jeffrey D. Feltman, the United Nations under secretary general for political affairs, told the council that 80 children were among the dead. At a briefing on Friday, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the top Pentagon spokesman, said it would have been difficult for separatists to fire the SA-11 without Russian help. “It strains credulity to think that it could be used by separatists without at least some measure of Russian support and technical assistance,” he said.
Ms. Power’s assertions were echoed by two senior Defense Department officials, who said the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies had concluded that an SA-11 missile, fired from an area near the Russia border, had downed the plane. Admiral Kirby raised the possibility that the Russian military had transported the system into Ukraine and even fired it. “Whether it was a system that was driven across the border by Russians and then handed off, we don’t know,” he said.
That conclusion was based on an analysis of the launch plume and trajectory of the missile, as detected by an American military spy satellite. The analysis did not pinpoint the origin of the missile or identify who launched it. But a senior Defense Department official said the Americans believed the missile had been launched “from several kilometers inside the Ukrainian border.” Separatist leaders on Friday denied taking down the Malaysian plane, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, dismissed Ukraine’s accusations of Russian involvement. “In the last few months, I have not heard practically any truthful statements from Kiev,” he said.
Ukrainian officials, who have called the downing a terrorist attack carried out by the separatists, have referred to the missile by a different name, Buk M1. The Ukrainian armed forces have Buk M1 missiles, which separatists may have purloined. The Russian Defense Ministry said at least five Ukrainian air defense systems were within range to down the plane. It added that the flight path and crash site were within two areas where Ukraine was operating a long-range S-200 air defense system, and where three squadrons were deployed with Buk-M1 medium-range air-defense systems.
“The analysts are still trying to get detailed granularity on that,” a senior Pentagon official said. “Those are the million-dollar questions.” Ukraine denied that any of its forces had been involved, and American officials said they believed that denial. “The Boeing was outside the zone of possible destruction by the antiaircraft forces of Ukraine,” Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told reporters.
There was also no indication on Friday of a motive, though most American analysts have concluded that the missile operators believed they were firing at a Ukrainian military plane, not a civilian jetliner. After months of trying to gently prod European allies to take tougher action against Moscow for its intervention in Ukraine, Mr. Obama decided to raise the diplomatic temperature on Friday on both Russia and American allies. He sent his United Nations ambassador, Samantha Power, to the Security Council to describe what she called “credible evidence” that the separatists were responsible.
American officials identified the lone American passenger known to have been aboard as Quinn Lucas Schansman, a dual citizen of the United States and the Netherlands.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, the Foreign Ministry announced that it planned to transport the victims to a special laboratory in the northeast city of Kharkiv, outside of rebel control, and was arranging visas and free hotel accommodations in Kiev and Kharkiv for relatives of the victims, whose nationalities spanned more than nine countries.
Ukrainian officials also said that some of the work of emergency responders at the crash site, near the mining town of Grabovo, had been hindered by the separatists, but that workers had recovered 181 bodies by midday on Friday. More than half of the passengers were Dutch.
Kostyantyn Batozsky, an adviser to the Donetsk regional governor, said in a telephone news conference that the aircraft voice and data recording devices had been recovered by Ukrainian emergency services workers whom the rebels had granted access to the crash site. But he said he did not know the current location of the devices or who had possession of them.
At the same time, Aleksandr Borodai, the pro-Russian rebel who leads the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, told reporters that his group had the so-called black boxes and intended to turn them over to officials at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which will be helping to secure the scene. Mr. Borodai said that Dutch and Malaysian officials had informally asked his group to leave the debris and bodies untouched.
The fighting in eastern Ukraine between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists has involved the successful use of missiles against aircraft at higher and higher altitudes.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, in denying any responsibility, noted that units of the Ukrainian Army possessed the Buk M1 air-defense missile launchers mentioned as the possible weapon that felled the jetliner. Much of the speculation surrounding the crash has focused on that system, particularly because the pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine bragged on social media in late June that they had taken possession of a Buk system after capturing a Ukrainian military base.
The crash remained the subject of intense debate in Grabovo as residents tried to come to grips with what had unfolded in the fields where they work, just yards from their homes.
Two villagers said quietly that they had seen the flash of a rocket in the sky around the time the plane went down. A man named Victor, who said he was too afraid to give his last name, said that he had been in his garden at the time and that he had seen “the light coming from a rocket.”
He said it had come from the direction of Snizhne, a city where the Ukrainians have been bombing rebel positions frequently for more than a week. “It was a rocket, I’m sure of it,” he said.
The other villager, Sergei, 15, who also did not want to give his last name, said he had been swimming in a nearby river when he saw what appeared to be a rocket being launched into the sky. He said he had jumped out of the water, hopped on his motorbike and sped home.
As a cloudy dawn came, the full horror in the field was on display. Small white pieces of cloth dotted the grassy farmland, marking the spots of bodies.
Four rebels in fatigues wandered through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings, guidebooks and bags. Asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military.
“This wasn’t ours,” said a rebel who identified himself only as Alexei, looking at an overhead bin in the grass with a rifle over his shoulder. “Why would we do this? We’re not animals.”
The smell of flesh hung heavily near a broken hulk of metal on the road where a body lay splayed. A foot with part of a leg was on the road.
The plane appeared to have broken apart at a great height, and pieces were scattered across fields for several miles. The two wings lay akimbo, as if pushed forward on impact. The plane had been full of fuel when it crashed, and the fire near the engine was fierce, turning the twisted metal remains into molten pools that hardened by morning.
“This is direct provocation of the E.U. and the U.S.,” said a rebel, Alexander Nikolaevich, who was walking along the road near the scene. “You see our weapons,” he said, pointing to his aging gun. “We started to win the war, and the fascists did this to stop us.”
When asked if the fight would continue, he said, “A little bit.”
In Malaysia, there was mourning on a Ramadan Friday. Malaysians, shocked at the loss of a second Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 — it has been just four months since a plane disappeared en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur — wondered openly why Flight 17 had been flying over an area where increasingly powerful surface-to-air missiles were being used.
In a statement delivered before dawn in Kuala Lumpur, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia noted pointedly that the International Civil Aviation Organization had declared the airspace safe and that the International Air Transport Association had not restricted travel there. “We must, and we will, find out precisely what happened to this flight,” Mr. Najib said.
Ukrainian and European air traffic controllers had continued to route civil flights over the contested area even as the fighting worsened, and even as flights directed by Russian controllers had apparently started to avoid it.
Ukrainian intelligence officials have pointed to a fighter named Igor Bezler, the militia leader in the eastern town of Gorlovka, saying he was heard in an intercepted phone call saying that his men had “shot down a plane” on Thursday. Several assassinations are believed to have happened under Mr. Bezler’s watch soon after his forces took Gorlovka, and he took responsibility for killing a number of Ukrainian militiamen in the town of Volnovakha some weeks ago.
According to Russian Internet sources, he was born in 1965 in Crimea and studied in Russia. He served in the Russian military but moved back to Ukraine in 2003, where he began to work as the head of security for a factory in Gorlovka. Biographies also note that he had worked in a company that performed burial services but was fired in 2012. He has been wanted by the Ukrainian authorities since April.
Mr. Bezler’s nom de guerre is Bes, which in Russian sounds like the first syllable of his last name, but also means demon. There are rumors that he does not get along with other militia leaders and that he has had street battles with the Vostok Battalion, though rebels have dismissed those allegations.
In a slickly produced video called “Heroes of Novorossii,” the name of the self-declared insurgent region, Mr. Bezler was shown wearing a light blue beret. He had blue eyes and a long mustache. In a recent interview with the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, he claimed to be holding 14 Ukrainian soldiers hostage and said the Ukrainian military had fallen apart, “much like the condition of the Russian military in the early 1990s.”
In the interview, Mr. Bezler said he was a Russian passport holder but had a residency permit in Ukraine. He said he sang the national anthem of the Soviet Union every morning and usually went to bed around 10:30 p.m. He confirmed that he had worked as head of security for the Gorlovka factory and claimed that he had been fired from the burial services company over a fight with the local mayor, who he said was demanding bribes.
The crash was another setback for Malaysia Airlines, which has already been struggling to recover from the loss of Flight 370, which vanished on March 8 during a red-eye flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The enduring mystery over that flight has severely hurt demand for Malaysia Airlines tickets, forcing the airline to offer budget-carrier prices even though it bears the costs of a full-service airline.