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 Fighting and artillery barrages flared near the Russian border in
the hours after President Barack Obama called the loss of flight
MH17 a "wake-up call" to Europe to join the United States in
threatening Moscow with heavier economic sanctions if it does not
use its influence to help end a conflict that has driven the gravest
East-West confrontation since the Cold War.
Malaysia, whose national airline has been battered by its second
major disaster this year, said it was "inhumane" to bar access to
the site around the village of Hrabove, near the city of Donetsk,
and said Russia was doing its "level best" to help. It defended the
use of an air corridor over Ukraine's war zone.
"The terrorists, with the help of Russia, are trying to destroy
evidence of international crimes," the Ukrainian government said in
a statement. "The terrorists have taken 38 bodies to the morgue in
Donetsk," it said, accusing people with "strong Russian accents" of
threatening to conduct autopsies.
Ukraine's prime minister said armed men barred government experts
from collecting evidence and threatened to detain them.
At Hrabove, one armed man from the separatist forces told Reuters
that bodies had been taken away in trucks. Amid reports of looting,
militants and local people say they have been doing their best to
collect evidence and preserve human remains.
 As the stench of death begins to pervade the area, a Reuters
correspondent watched rescue workers carry bodies across the fields
and gather remains in black sacks. One local resident said Ukrainian
fighter jets had flown over the area earlier.
THREATS
Quite who controls what around the site is unclear. Rebel forces,
who have declared a Donetsk People's Republic in the
Russian-speaking east and want union with Moscow, have set up
cordons and checkpoints around the area.
The security council in Kiev said staff of the emergencies ministry
had found 186 bodies - a little more than half the 298 aboard the
Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 - and had checked some 18 sq.km (7
square miles) of the scattered 25-sq.km crash site. But the workers
were not free to conduct a normal investigation.
"The fighters have let the Emergencies Ministry workers in there but
they are not allowing them to take anything from the area," security
council spokesman Andriy Lysenko said. "The fighters are taking away
all that has been found."
He added that he had no information on the black box flight
recorders, both of which separatists have said have been found.
A party of observers from Europe's OSCE security body, based in
Donetsk, visited the site on Friday and found access limited by what
it said were hostile armed men, some of them drunk.
Following a demand from the United Nations Security Council for an
independent investigation, both sides in the conflict have offered
ceasefires and cooperation but the situation on the ground remains
confused and Ukrainian officials said there were several clashes
overnight in areas near the city of Luhansk.
A team of Malaysian experts flew in to Kiev on Saturday.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk issued a statement after
he spoke to the foreign minister of The Netherlands - more than half
those aboard the flight from Amsterdam were Dutch.
He said government experts sent to the site "were not given the
opportunity to collect evidence".
"They gave them less than an hour there, and made them leave the
site of the catastrophe threatening to take them hostage."
WAKE-UP CALL
With some commentators talking of a pivotal moment in the East-West
confrontation over Ukraine that began in November, Obama said the
shooting down of MH17 in a region controlled by Russian-backed
separatists should be a "wake-up call for Europe and the world" - an
indication of some U.S. impatience at worry among EU allies that
challenging Moscow could hurt their trade.
While stopping short of blaming Russia for Thursday's loss of the
plane, three hours into a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, he
said it was the Kremlin's failure to stop the violence that made it
possible to shoot down the plane.
A senior U.S. official said there was increasing confidence that the
missile was fired by separatist, as the Ukrainian government
asserts, and that there was no reason to doubt the validity of a
audiotape that Kiev has circulated in which voices identified as
separatists discussed the downing of the plane.
"This certainly will be a wake-up call for Europe and the world that
there are consequences to an escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine;
that it is not going to be localized, it is not going to be
contained," Obama told reporters on Friday.
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Obama spoke by phone later with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
British Prime Minister David Cameron and Australian Prime Minister
Tony Abbott. The White House said they discussed Ukraine and the
downed jet and the need for an unimpeded international investigation
into what happened.
Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said on Saturday he
would fly to the Ukraine capital of Kiev to ensure an investigating
team gets safe access to the site. Before setting off, he said it
would be "inhumane" not to have access, but said Moscow was trying
to help: "They are trying their level best to assist Malaysia to
ensure we have a safe site," Liow said. Defence Minister and
former transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said a priority was
to ensure debris was not tampered with.
"We want to get to the bottom of this," he added, saying that
Malaysia had been in touch with officials in Russia, Ukraine, the
United States, Britain and China.
"We do not have a position until the facts have been verified,
whether the plane was really brought down, how it was brought down,
who brought it down," he said.
International observers said gunmen stopped them examining the site
properly when they got there on Friday. More than half of the
victims were Dutch in what has become a pivotal incident in
deteriorating relations between Russia and the West.
Obama ruled out military intervention.
DENIALS
Russia, which Obama said was letting the rebels bring in weapons,
has expressed anger at implications it was to blame, saying people
should not prejudge the outcome of an inquiry. The rebels have said
Ukrainian government forces downed the plane.
The United Nations said 80 children were aboard. The deadliest
attack on a commercial airliner, follows the disappearance of flight
MH370 in March with 239 passengers.
Makeshift white flags marked where bodies lay in corn fields and
among the debris. Others, stripped bare by the force of the crash,
had been covered by polythene sheeting weighed down by stones, one
marked with a flower in remembrance.
One pensioner said a woman smashed though her roof. "There was a
howling noise and everything started to rattle. Then objects started
falling out of the sky," said Irina Tipunova, 65. "And then I heard
a roar and she landed in the kitchen."
The scale of the disaster could prove a turning point for
international pressure to resolve the crisis in Ukraine, which has
killed hundreds since pro-Western protests toppled the Moscow-backed
president in Kiev in February and Russia annexed the Crimea
peninsula a month later.
"This outrageous event underscores that it is time for peace and
security to be restored in Ukraine," Obama said, adding that Russia
had failed to use its influence to curb rebel violence.
While the West has imposed sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, the
United States has been more aggressive than the European Union.
Analysts say the response of Germany and other EU powers to the
incident - possibly imposing more sanctions - could be crucial in
deciding the next phase of the standoff with Moscow.
Some commentators even recalled Germany's sinking of the Atlantic
liner Lusitania in 1915, which helped push the United States into
World War One, but outrage in the West at Thursday's carnage is not
seen as leading to military intervention.
The U.N. Security Council called for a "full, thorough and
independent international investigation" into the downing of the
plane and "appropriate accountability" for those responsible.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was too early to decide on
further sanctions before it was known exactly what had happened to
the plane. Britain took a similar line but later echoed Obama in
pointing the finger at the separatists.
Kiev and Moscow immediately blamed each other for the disaster,
triggering a new phase in their propaganda war.
(Additional reporting by Pavel Polityuk and Elizabeth Piper in Kiev,
Peter Graff in Donetsk and Siva Govindasamy and Al-Zaquan Amer
Hamzah in Kuala Lumpur; Writing by Alastair Macdonald)
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