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"Come on NATO do what you are supposed to do" |
A missile launcher allegedly used to destroy Flight MH17 has been smuggled across the Ukrainian border into Russia to cover up its role in
the strike, Ukraine’s interior minister claimed Friday.
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."