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.
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.
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.
“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.
“We don’t have time for propaganda,” he said. “We don’t have time for games.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html?_r=1
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