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| "Come on NATO do what you are supposed to do" |
Amid mounting evidence that Russian-backed separatists were behind the disaster, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said “technical assistance” from Russia could not be ruled out.
In a pointed reference to Moscow, Samantha Power added that the perpetrators should not be “sheltered” by any UN member state.
In a day of claim and counter-claim, Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, said a Buk mobile launch vehicle had been moved since the destruction of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200 on Thursday, and that it was missing at least one rocket. He claimed the launcher had been tracked by Ukrainian intelligence agents as it passed by the town of Krasnodon in the Luhansk region.
A 13-second video showed a tarpaulin-covered vehicle being driven through a semi-rural location with green and white missiles still visible, but it was not possible to confirm the veracity of the claim.
Mr. Avakov wrote on Facebook: “To all appearance, this is exactly the Buk rocket complex which fired at the aircraft flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.”
Photographs also emerged purportedly showing a Buk battery being moved in a rebel-held area close to the crash site.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, dismissed suggestions that Moscow was involved in the alleged strike. The separatists also denied involvement, claiming that they did not have a weapon capable of such an attack.
However, the separatists themselves announced last month that they had seized at least one Buk missile launcher from a Ukrainian army base in Donetsk.
Ms. Power told the UN Security Council: “We assess Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 … was likely downed by a surface-to-air missile, [likely] an SA-11 [the U.S. designation for a Buk missile], operated from a separatist location in eastern Ukraine.” She added: “We cannot rule out technical assistance from the Russians.
The perpetrators must be brought to justice, they must not be sheltered by any member state of the United Nations.”
The father in a Dutch family which had lost relatives in the Russian missile shoot down of the Malaysian Airliner above Ukraine said: "Why doesn't NATO, which never hesitates to us drone attacks on anything they find suspicious or smell of terrorism, doesn't destroy these Buck bases in and on the border of Russia".
"What will Russia do? Probably nothing. Mr. Putin certainly can't be that stupid to risk the third world war by striking back ? - the world owes it to the victims of the crash to do something dramatic, so the perpetrators never do this again."
