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| A pro-Russian fighter guards the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 near the village of Hrabove, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, July 20, 2014. Rebels in eastern Ukraine took control Sunday of the bodies recovered from downed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and the U.S. and European leaders demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin make sure rebels give international investigators full access to the crash site. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Video of a rocket launcher, one surface-to-air missile missing,
leaving the likely launch site. Imagery showing the firing. Calls
claiming credit for the strike. Recordings said to reveal a cover-up at
the crash site.
"A buildup of extraordinary
circumstantial evidence ... it's powerful here," said Secretary of State
John Kerry, a former prosecutor, and it holds Russian-supported rebels
in eastern Ukraine responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17, with the Kremlin complicit in the deaths of nearly 300
passengers and crew members.
"This is the
moment of truth for Russia," said Kerry, leveling some of Washington's
harshest criticism of Moscow since the crisis in Ukraine began.
"Russia
is supporting these separatists. Russia is arming these separatists.
Russia is training these separatists, and Russia has not yet done the
things necessary in order to try to bring them under control," he said.
In
a round of television interviews, Kerry cited a mix of U.S. and
Ukrainian intelligence and social media reports that he said "obviously
points a very clear finger at the separatists" for firing the missile
that brought the plane down, killing nearly 300 passengers and crew.
"It's pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia into the hands of separatists," he said.
Video
of an SA-11 launcher, with one of its missiles missing and leaving the
likely launch site, has been authenticated, he said.
An
Associated Press journalist saw a missile launcher in rebel-held
territory close to the crash site just hours before the plane was
brought down Thursday.
"There's a buildup of
extraordinary circumstantial evidence," Kerry said. "We picked up the
imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came
from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this
aircraft disappeared from the radar. We also know from voice
identification that the separatists were bragging about shooting it down
afterward."
In one set of calls, said by
Ukrainian security services to have been recorded shortly after the
plane was hit, a prominent rebel commander, Igor Bezler, tells a Russian
military intelligence officer that rebel forces shot down a plane.
Shortly
before Kerry's television appearances, the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, the
Ukrainian capital, released a statement saying experts had authenticated
the calls.
"Audio data provided to the press
by the Ukrainian security service was evaluated by intelligence
community analysts who confirmed these were authentic conversations
between known separatist leaders, based on comparing the
Ukraine-released internet audio to recordings of known separatists," the
statement said.
A new set of recordings apparently made Friday also appears to implicate rebels in an attempted cover-up at the crash site.
In
one exchange, a man identified as the leader of the rebel Vostok
Battalion Alexander Khodakovsky states that two recording devices are
being held by the head of intelligence of the insurgency's military
commander. The commander is then heard to order the militiaman to ensure
no outsiders, including an international observation team near the
crash site at the reported time of the call, get hold of any material.
The
man identified as Khodakovsky says he is pursuing inquiries about the
black boxes under instructions from "our high-placed friends ... in
Moscow."
In another conversation with a rebel
representative at the crash site who reports finding an orange box
marked as a satellite navigation box, Khodakovsky is purported to order
that the object be hidden.
U.S. aviation
safety experts say they are especially concerned the site will be
"spoiled" if it cannot be quickly secured by investigators. Based on
photographs, they say it is a very large debris field consistent with an
in-flight explosion and the main evidence to be collected would be
pieces of the missile.
Because the integrity
of the plane and actions of the pilots are not an issue, the experts do
not believe the flight recorders will yield much useful information.
U.S.
and Ukrainian authorities have been at the forefront of accusations
that the separatists, aided by Russia, are responsible, although other
countries, including Australia and Britain have offered similar, if less
definitive, assessments.
British Prime
Minister David Cameron said in an unusual front-page piece in the Sunday
Times that there is growing evidence that separatist backed by Russia
shot down the aircraft.
"If President
(Vladimir) Putin does not change his approach to Ukraine, then Europe
and the West must fundamentally change our approach to Russia," Cameron
wrote.
Putin and other Russian officials have
blamed the government in Ukraine for creating the situation and
atmosphere in which the plane was downed, but have yet to directly
address the allegations that the separatists were responsible or were
operating with technical assistance from Moscow.
In
his interviews, Kerry accused Russia of "playing" a dual-track policy
in Ukraine of saying one thing and doing another. That, he said, "is
really threatening both the larger interests as well as that region and
threatening Ukraine itself."
He lamented that
the level of trust between Washington and Moscow is now at a low ebb,
saying it "would be ridiculous at this point in time to be trusting" of
what the Kremlin says.
Kerry also said the
administration was hopeful that the incident would galvanize support in
Europe for increasing sanctions on Russia over its overall actions in
Ukraine.
"We hope this is a wake-up call for
some countries in Europe that have been reluctant to move," Kerry said,
noting that President Barack Obama had signed off on a new round of
sanctions on Russia the day before the plane went down.
Kerry
made his comments in appearance on five talk shows: CNN's "State of the
Union," "Fox News Sunday," CBS's "Face the Nation," NBC's "Meet the
Press," and ABC's "This Week."
