An armed pro-Russian separatist gestures as he blocks the way to the crash site of MH17. Source: AFP
CORPSES bloat and the stench ripens. In July, it is sunny and warm in east Ukraine. The occasional rains hasten decomposition, and this draws another kind of army: the flies.
Relatives worldwide watch the reports. Their loved ones are the casualties of a war of which they never enlisted. It is a no-man's land without precedent. These are the stories that ought not need to be told, about souls doomed to a badlands of peasantries and pillages. Here, their deaths are treated as an unfortunate distraction.
Men in big boots stomp through wheat fields. Their balaclava-clad heads poke through sunflower crops. A man is seen lifting a ring and putting it in a plastic bag. Piles of clothes and children's toys are heaped next to pieces of luggage that did not blow open on impact.
PART ONE: THE FULL STORY OF THE DOOMED FLIGHT
AUSTRALIAN PERSONNEL TO BE INCREASED
An Australian journalist early to the scene checks wallets on the ground: none contains money. In Malaysia, Cameron Dalziel's widow Reine is cancelling his credit card because it is being used in Ukraine.
In the Netherlands, relatives ring the mobile phones of lost loves. They are answered by men with thick accents. Each successful connection is another show of disrespect, another call of the wild.
An extended internet news report circulates. The footage depicts limbs at ragdoll angles. What it does not show is almost as terrible. Where are the protocols? Bodies lie uncovered, it seems, except when villagers scrunch up plastic sheeting.
The viewer's anger swells: is the provision of the barest dignity too much to spare for these barbarian troops? For here the bodies will stay, untended, while separatists menace official observers and shellfire rumbles in the distance.
The crime is one abomination. The cover up — under the gaze of the western world — is another.
SORTING OUT BODIES, REMAINS
Wreckage in a field of sunflowers
OUR GRANDCHILDREN ARE GONE
HEARTBREAKING PLIGHT EXPOSED BY MH17
THE Russian separatists take possession of at least one of the two black boxes by Friday, but deny possession for another day or so. Footage suggests one of the two instruments thudded down in a wheat field. Black boxes are critical to any plane-crash investigation. They hold flight-path details and cockpit conversations.
So, too, is the crash site, which, in this case, spreads across 35sq km or more, and is being trampled by troops, farmers and journalists — pretty much anyone in the first few days except international crash investigators who seek to preserve the scene from contamination.
There is initial talk of a local ceasefire: conflicting reports dispel any Western assumptions that this would be a given. The MH17, for the first of many times, is being cast by local powers as a sideshow to bigger preoccupations.
Again, we can thank the Ukrainian security service for apparent phone intercepts that help explain the black box discoveries. A separatist battalion leader, Alexander Khodakovsky, says two recording devices are being held by the head of intelligence of the separatists' military commander.
That commander has orders — no outsiders, including a nearby international observation team, are to get hold of the material. Khodakovsky says he is awaiting instructions on the black boxes from "our high-placed friends … in Moscow".
It is Malaysia that announces, with pride, that it has secured access to the black boxes after extensive negotiations with Alexander Borodai, the denim-loving president of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. The boxes are unveiled from a white plastic bag. Borodai bowls up to a press conference, a study in nonchalance. "Here they are, the black boxes," he reportedly says.
By now, after three days, bodies are suddenly being carted away. As are plane parts, for no good reason. The remains are stored in four train trucks in Torez, about 15km from the crash sites. They are refrigerated by a locomotive, but not soon enough for an inspection team engulfed by the smell in the absence of protective gear.
Ukrainian State Emergency Service employees sort through debris.
Sinister images multiply, from the armed guards and their German shepherds, to the passer-by clutching at her nose. Ukraine monitors say the separatists have taken the bodies at gunpoint. US Secretary of State John Kerry is outraged: "Drunken, I mean, literally drunken separatist soldiers are piling bodies into trucks unceremoniously, and destroying evidence and disturbing the pattern that is there."
There are said to be 282 bodies on the train. This becomes 200, a more reasonable estimate given Dutch investigators — as well as others — report bodies still on the ground. A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Michael Bociurkiw, notes the lack of recovery activity.
The OSCE has been on site since the day after the crash (it has been in the area observing for months, and members have been kidnapped by splinter separatist militias). It has been kept at a distance, sometimes with guns, but Bociurkiw has seen odd changes in the wreckage's appearance.
Plane parts seem to have been sliced into. Members have observed the cockpit section being cut by uniformed men with a power saw. The tailfin looks different. Others see a crane lifting plane parts. A van tugs at wreckage with a rope. Angle grinders whirr.
From far-off capitals of the world, where notions of process matter, educated observers toss out their diplomatic rule books. "What we have seen is evidence tampering on an industrial scale," says Prime Minister Tony Abbott. President Barack Obama is just as direct: "What exactly are they trying to hide?"
If it is evidence of a missile blast, the separatists fail, at least insofar that media photos clearly show shrapnel blast patterns to sections of the fuselage. Closer observations show they resemble machinegun fire.
If it is the fragments of the missile itself they hope to hide, their success or otherwise is more difficult to measure. One aviation expert tells BBC World that because both sides of the conflict have access to SA-11s, the existence of fragments alone would not prove a lot.
Crash investigators still cannot secure the site after a week. Much is made of an agreement that the Dutch will control the crash investigation. Yet the deal seems misplaced — it is struck with Ukraine, not the separatists who control the crash site.
Separatist battalion leader, Alexander Khodakovsky, earlier overheard in phone intercepts concerning the black box, gives an interview with Reuters. He is reported, at some length, as saying that the separatists had an SA-11, and that the Ukraine government had provoked the "usage of this kind of weapon against a plane with civilians which was flying by".
Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and members of a forensic team inspect a refrigerator wagon containing remains of victims from MH17 at a railway station in the eastern Ukrainian town of Torez.
Perhaps Khodakovsky is reminded that his leader, Alexander Borodai, has earlier said the separatists have never possessed SA-11s. Khodakovsky announces he has been quoted out of context.
Promises are made to keep a 20km radius war-free. Yet on one crucial point it makes no difference: investigators will never know where most of the bodies came to rest. The final outcome will always stand to be disputed, aviation expert David Learmount tells the BBC. Those hostile to the findings will simply point to the delays.
UKRAINE is eager to press on with war. Its parliament approves a military call-up for men under the age of 50 for assaults on separatist strongholds such as Donetsk.
One such attack begins soon after the "train of death" leaves Donetsk on Monday night. News Corp's Charles Miranda shelters in a suburban basement as mortars land "indiscriminately".
"I was the first person to come across four civilian bodies," he tells 3AW's Neil Mitchell. "It was a very nice park, a beautiful park, in fact, and there was a lady, and on any other day you'd think she was just lying out on the grass having a nice time.
"Unfortunately, she was walking across the square when the mortars started dropping. We ran into the first basement we found and when we walked out there she was just lying in the park and she no longer had a head."
The train finally arrives at Kharkiv, where the remains will be loaded on planes bound for Amsterdam. It is 4½ days since the MH17 blast. The train has run late, of course — there's talk of a holdup at a separatist checkpoint.
A piece of the wreckage of MH17 is pictured in a field near the village of Grabove, in the region of Donetsk.
Dov Avnon has written an open letter to Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. His own father, now 96, had once been sent to Siberia. He is tortured by the thought of his son, Ithamar, lying in a train carriage that is not moving.
On Wednesday, the remains are flown out of Kharkiv, a city tilted in grief — here, in the winter of 1941, the Nazis shot dead more than 15,000 Jews. The remains may takes weeks or longer to be identified, but the victims are finally received with due solemnity at the Netherlands' Eindhoven Air Base. The Last Post plays and hearses form a long procession for 40 victims, the first on the journey home.
Two Ukraine fighter jets are, the same day, shot down to the southeast of the MH17 crash sites. The war does not stop for the international calamity: local military strategists simply work around the bubble it has conjured.
Many locals have evacuated Donetsk in recent days. Shops are boarded up. It's school holidays, and Miranda detects a weary resignation in some of the 70-odd kids he finds huddled in a basement during a Ukraine shelling. He leaves on a crammed train to Kiev. Most passengers carry what they can — and a bottle of vodka.
Other nearby towns have been blockaded and shelled of late. They have run out of food and been without power or water. More than 400 people have died — not including the 298 souls on MH17.
The locals of Donetsk are mostly bystanders, who sometimes double as casualties, in a territorial dispute. It's been this way since April, more or less: then again, it's been this way, on and off, for generations.
US Secretary of State John Kerry is unequivocal. His conclusions follow the evidence. "Russia is supporting these separatists," he says three days after the MH17 disaster.
"Russia is arming these separatists. Russia is training these separatists, and Russia has not yet done the things necessary in order to try and bring them under control."
Rin Norris (in black hat) and Anthony Maslin are joined by friends in grieving the loss of their three children, Evie, Mo and Otis.
Russia, of course, likes to run things, dating back to Stalin's stitching up of President Roosevelt in the final days of the Second World War. At home, more recently, girl band Pussy Riot went to jail for naughty lyrics. To tighten internet controls, Russia in April introduced a new law — official registration for bloggers with as few as 3000 daily visitors.
Yet other regulations appear decidedly more lax. The Donetsk People's Republic has had a recruiting office in Moscow. Fighters with heavy weapons experience are openly prized. Fuelled by state-controlled media propaganda, separatists are promoted as "heroes" within Russia who fight "forces of evil". So says Maria Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank in the Moscow Times.
Putin's motives are more knotted than a simple power grab. An insurgency could spoil Ukraine's appeal in Europe, where it seeks EU and NATO partnerships. Russia is smarting after losing its grip in the Ukraine. The problem is the threat of sanctions from the West, especially for an economy sliding into recession.
At first, the MH17 crash is thought to change everything. It is linked to the 1988 Lockerbie plane bombing and the pariah status then tagged to Libya's Colonel Gaddafi. There's talk of Putin's G20 invitation being ripped up, and Russia's hosting of the 2018 World Cup being revoked.
The catastrophe draws new boundaries for a secretive man used to drawing his own. He may be photographed semi-naked on a horse — vanity is universal — but a newspaper once closed soon after one of its reporters asked about troubles in his marriage.
Now one of Putin's daughters, who've always been treated as off-limits under the fearsome controls at home, is said to have fled her home in the Netherlands after public threats are made and photos are published.
An independent analyst, Sergey Shelin, describes the Kremlin's choices as "bad and worse". Lipman says Putin needs a totally "unexpected manoeuvre to get out of this one".
Putin is well-known for his feints: spreading confusion is key to his endurance. Take Crimea. In March, he claimed Russian troops were not involved in its annexation (the first extension of Russian lands since the Second World War). Later, he admitted Russian troops were there, pinned some medals on chests, and his popularity soared.
Putin's strategy this time appears to be confusion. The willing collection of goons at the crash site affords him time. Meanwhile, he is quoted back home talking about the need for crash-site investigators and their security.
The Maslin children, Evie, Mo and Otis, 10yo who were killed in the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.
A Monday announcement by Russia's military documenting "evidence" of Ukrainian fighter jets is dismissed elsewhere as absurd. In Russia, however, it receives great media coverage, as do official suggestions that Ukrainian officials — not separatists — have impeded investigation efforts.
Many suspect Putin of "maskirovka", a Russian term for military deception. The long-held theory couples Ukrainian complaints that strikes against their aircraft are fired from the other side of the Russian border (including the two fighter jets shot down on Wednesday).
US officials now appear to support the claims. They say that small groups of Russian troops have moved closer to the Ukraine border, and that the Russians have continued to supply the separatists with tanks and launchers since MH17.
At the same time, Russia agrees to a UN resolution that demands investigators are provided with safe and unfettered access to the site. Abbott speaks of a cooperative Putin in phone calls.
Days later, despite what's considered Australian diplomatic triumph, the separatists are still not providing such access. The head of the Dutch police mission, Jan Tuinder, reduces access troubles to a single word: "lunatics".
Perhaps Putin is not as cornered as it first seems. Europe hints at more sanctions against Russia. Heavier measures targeted at Putin's "cronies" are canvassed, but the EU — a cumbersome coalition — is accused of dithering. Obama, meanwhile, is criticised at home for lacking outrage.
Western commentators differ, but they broadly describe Putin as a brazen empire builder who yields to nothing less than force. "If you're one of those who thought the attack on a civilian plane with Russian missiles would change everything, or even something, you lost," says the Wall Street Journal.
STEVE Medcraft is a new (and perhaps fleeting) voice in world affairs. Still, he's willing enough. The Hume City councillor volunteers that Putin is "cold", "calculating" and "uncaring". Medcraft is just warming up.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's motives are more knotted than a simple power grab over Ukraine.
He cringes at the TV images, and compares events to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and the Nazi invasion of Poland of 1939. He attends the multi-faith service at St Paul's Cathedral on Thursday. It soothes the pain, he says, but does not quell his anger.
"They have no respect for human life," Medcraft says of the separatists. "I'm absolutely shattered by the way they have treated the site. It goes all the way to the top. Putin has a lot to answer for."
What Medcraft lacks in statesmanship, he makes up for in feeling. He first met Albert Rizk about 30 years ago. Rizk was dating Medcraft's sister. That pairing ended, but the men often later chatted over "frothies", watching their adult sons play together for the Sunbury Lions footy team.
As competing real estate agents, they good-naturedly sparred about business. Ribbing characterises the nature of their last encounter in June. They talked "crap".
Medcraft recalls that Rizk was very excited about his upcoming European vacation. Now the nature of his fate is in limbo. Loved ones can't know when Albert and wife Maree's remains will be returned, when the funeral will be, or when a future, or at least a version of it, will be glimpsed beyond the fog.
Bacchus Marsh Grammar School principal Andrew Neal is mindful of such concerns when he issues a statement on Monday morning. The day before, 700 turn out to commemorate the van den Hende family, to weep as balloons float into the sky. Neal urges the 1800 students, and their parents, to strive for "normality".
The van den Hende story sounds easy and inviting: they are the neighbours who enjoyed a beer, a wine or a cuppa. Kids Piers, Marnix and Margaux loved soccer, swimming and dancing. Mum Shaliza warmed to the quirk of kangaroos on the golf course. Dad Hans, according to colleagues at Innovia Securities, was "a gentle giant".
Neal is proud of the school community. It is versed in loss — late last year, the father of a year 12 student died in a farming accident. There is quiet, respectful grief, he says of last week, and there are classes.
"Often we underestimate how mature and resilient young people are," Neal says. Yet he offers one piece of firm advice to staff and students. Turn off the TV.
Armed pro-Russian separatists block the way to the crash site.
Still, sad MH17 tales keep reaching out, as if to deny the world a distraction. The news that Hans van den Hende had recovered from cancer. Or the 11-year-old-boy and his farewell hug at Schiphol Airport. "What will happen if the aeroplane crashes?" he asked his mother.
In Perth, the worst in humanity is countered with the best. Rin Norris and Anthony Maslin are grieving the loss of their children Mo, 12, Evie, 10, and Otis, 8. "No one deserves the pain of what we are going through," they write. "Not even the people who shot our whole family out of the sky."
At the crash site, meanwhile, bodies rot and farmers drive harvesters and shells rumble in the distance. Another fragment of fuselage is discovered in a wooded area. It's not ideal but investigators are, finally, being allowed to examine the damage when one world blasts a hole in another.
It's not a case of barbarians at the gate: they tore it down the afternoon MH17 fell to the earth.
Luggage at the crash site.
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